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Author: Anthony Harkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 0195189507
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis text argues that the hillbilly - in his various guises - has been viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the modern order and as a keeper of traditional values and thus symbolic of a nostalgic past free of the problems of contemporary life.
Author: Neil Foley
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1998-01-02
Total Pages: 370
ISBN-13: 9780520918528
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a book that fundamentally challenges our understanding of race in the United States, Neil Foley unravels the complex history of ethnicity in the cotton culture of central Texas. This engrossing narrative, spanning the period from the Civil War through the collapse of tenant farming in the early 1940s, bridges the intellectual chasm between African American and Southern history on one hand and Chicano and Southwestern history on the other. The White Scourge describes a unique borderlands region, where the cultures of the South, West, and Mexico overlap, to provide a deeper understanding of the process of identity formation and to challenge the binary opposition between "black" and "white" that often dominates discussions of American race relations. In Texas, which by 1890 had become the nation's leading cotton-producing state, the presence of Mexican sharecroppers and farm workers complicated the black-white dyad that shaped rural labor relations in the South. With the transformation of agrarian society into corporate agribusiness, white racial identity began to fracture along class lines, further complicating categories of identity. Foley explores the "fringe of whiteness," an ethno-racial borderlands comprising Mexicans, African Americans, and poor whites, to trace shifting ideologies and power relations. By showing how many different ethnic groups are defined in relation to "whiteness," Foley redefines white racial identity as not simply a pinnacle of status but the complex racial, social, and economic matrix in which power and privilege are shared. Foley skillfully weaves archival material with oral history interviews, providing a richly detailed view of everyday life in the Texas cotton culture. Addressing the ways in which historical categories affect the lives of ordinary people, The White Scourge tells the broader story of racial identity in America; at the same time it paints an evocative picture of a unique American region. This truly multiracial narrative touches on many issues central to our understanding of American history: labor and the role of unions, gender roles and their relation to ethnicity, the demise of agrarian whiteness, and the Mexican-American experience.
Author: Brannon Costello
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2007-12
Total Pages: 216
ISBN-13: 0807135240
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Plantation Airs, Brannon Costello argues persuasively for new attention to the often neglected issue of class in southern literary studies. Focusing on the relationship between racial paternalism and social class in American novels written after World War II, Costello asserts that well into the twentieth century, attitudes and behaviors associated with an idealized version of agrarian antebellum aristocracy -- especially, those of racial paternalism -- were believed to be essential for white southerners. The wealthy employed them to validate their identities as "aristocrats," while less-affluent whites used them to separate themselves from "white trash" in the social hierarchy. Even those who were not legitimate heirs of plantation-owning families found that "putting on airs" associated with the legacy of the plantation could align them with the forces of power and privilege and offer them a measure of authority in the public arena that they might otherwise lack. Fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Ernest Gaines, Walker Percy, and others reveals, however, that the racial paternalism central to class formation and mobility in the South was unraveling in the years after World War II, when the civil rights movement and the South's increasing industrialization dramatically altered southern life. Costello demonstrates that these writers were keenly aware of the ways in which the changes sweeping the South complicated the deeply embedded structures that governed the relationship between race and class. He further contends that the collapse of racial paternalism as a means of organizing class lies at the heart of their most important works -- including Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and her essay "The 'Pet Negro' System," Welty's Delta Wedding and The Ponder Heart, Faulkner's The Mansion and The Reivers, Gaines's Of Love and Dust and his story "Bloodline," and Percy's The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins. By examining ways in which these works depict and critique the fall of the plantation ideal and its aftermath, Plantation Airs indicates the richness and complexity of the literary responses to this intersection of race and class. Understanding how many of the modern South's best writers imagined and engaged the various facets of racial paternalism in their fiction, Costello confirms, helps readers construct a more comprehensive picture of the complications and contradictions of class in the South.
Author: Jan Whitt
Publisher: Hamilton Books
Published: 2012-03-22
Total Pages: 185
ISBN-13: 076185830X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA scholar of Southern literature and culture, Jan Whitt has written a personal narrative about adoption, childhood abuse, and fifty years of searching for her family in rural Appalachia. A testament to the power of love and the resilience of the human spirit, Rain on a Strange Roof unflinchingly explores death and loss at the same time that it celebrates the transformative power of love and literature. An award-winning professor, Whitt teaches courses in American and British literature, literary journalism, media, and women’s studies. Quoting from films, novels, and short stories about the American South, Whitt weaves a narrative about the necessity for human connection and the desire for home.
Author: Andy Oler
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2019-06-12
Total Pages: 249
ISBN-13: 0807171603
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Midwest holds two conflicting positions in the American cultural imagination, both of which rob the region of its distinctiveness. Often, it is seen as the “heartland,” a pastoral ideal standing in for all of American culture. Alternatively, the Midwest can represent “flyover country,” part of an expansive, undifferentiated mass between the coasts. In Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature, Andy Oler challenges both views by pairing fiction and poetry from the region with cultural and material texts that illustrate the processes by which regional modernism both opposes and absorbs prevailing models of twentieth-century manhood. Although it acknowledges a tradition of Midwestern urban literature, Old-Fashioned Modernism focuses on representations of life on farms and in small towns that generate specific forms of rural modernity. Oler considers a series of male protagonists who both fulfill and resist conventional American narratives of economic advancement, spatial experience, and gender roles. The writers he studies portray the onset of socioeconomic and mechanical modernity by merging realist and naturalist narratives with upwellings of modernist form and style. His analysis charts a trajectory in which Midwestern literature depicts experiences that appear dependent on nostalgic pastoralism but actually foreground the ongoing fragmentation and emerging anxieties of the countryside. In detailed readings of novels by Sherwood Anderson, William Cunningham, Langston Hughes, Wright Morris, and Dawn Powell, as well as the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Oler highlights images of men from the rural Midwest who face the tensions between agricultural production and mass industrialization. These works of literature, which Oler examines alongside pieces of material culture like advertisements for farm implements and record labels, feature communities that support self-made as well as corporate identities. As portraits of the Midwest that resist the totalizing trajectory of industrialization, these texts generate spaces that meld rural and urban economics, land use, and affective experiences. Old-Fashioned Modernism reveals how Midwestern regionalism negotiates the anxieties and dominant narratives of early- and midcentury rural masculinities, as regional literature and culture alter the forms and spaces of literary modernism.
Author: Jolene Hubbs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2022-12-15
Total Pages: 205
ISBN-13: 1009250604
DOWNLOAD EBOOKClass, Whiteness, and Southern Literature explores the role that representations of poor white people play in shaping both middle-class American identity and major American literary movements and genres across the long twentieth century. Jolene Hubbs reveals that, more often than not, poor white characters imagined by middle-class writers embody what better-off people are anxious to distance themselves from in a given moment. Poor white southerners are cast as social climbers during the status-conscious Gilded Age, country rubes in the modern era, racist obstacles to progress during the civil rights struggle, and junk food devotees in the health-conscious 1990s. Hubbs illuminates how Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, and Barbara Robinette Moss swam against these tides, pioneering formal innovations with an eye to representing poor white characters in new ways.
Author: Harry L. Watson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2008-04-28
Total Pages: 526
ISBN-13: 0807886467
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat does "redneck" mean? What's going to happen to the southern accent? What makes black southerners laugh? What is "real" country music? These are the kinds of questions that pop up in this collection of notable essays from Southern Cultures, the journal of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Intentionally plural, Southern Cultures was founded in 1993 to present all sides of the American South, from sorority sisters to Pocahontas, from kudzu to the blues. This volume collects 27 essays from the journal's first fifteen years, bringing together some of the most memorable and engaging essays as well as some of those most requested for use in courses. A stellar cast of contributors discusses themes of identity, pride, traditions, changes, conflicts, and stereotypes. Topics range from black migrants in Chicago to Mexican immigrants in North Carolina, from Tennessee wrestlers to Martin Luther King, from the Civil War to contemporary debates about the Confederate flag. Funny and serious, historical and contemporary, the collection offers something new for every South-watcher, with fresh perspectives on enduring debates about the people and cultures of America's most complex region. Contributors: Derek H. Alderman, East Carolina University Donna G'Segner Alderman, Greenville, North Carolina S. Jonathan Bass, Samford University Dwight B. Billings, University of Kentucky Catherine W. Bishir, Preservation North Carolina Kathleen M. Blee, University of Pittsburgh Elizabeth Boyd, Vanderbilt University James C. Cobb, University of Georgia Peter A. Coclanis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Joseph Crespino, Emory University Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University franklin forts, University of Georgia David Goldfield, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Larry J. Griffin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Adam Gussow, University of Mississippi Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Patrick Huber, University of Missouri-Rolla Louis M. Kyriakoudes, University of Southern Mississippi Melton McLaurin, University of North Carolina at Wilmington Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina Steve Oney, Los Angeles, California Theda Perdue, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Dan Pierce, University of North Carolina at Asheville John Shelton Reed, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Mart Stewart, Western Washington University Thomas A. Tweed, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Timothy B. Tyson, Duke University Anthony Walton, Bowdoin College Harry L. Watson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Charles Reagan Wilson, University of Mississippi C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999)
Author: Jack Temple Kirby
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 132
ISBN-13: 9780820317236
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt once upholding and refuting the South's conservative image, The Countercultural South explores the politically divergent cultures of resistance created by poor white and working-class black southern men. With humor and insight, Jack Temple Kirby traces these racially and politically opposed cultures back to the antebellum encounter between the anti-capitalistic South and the capitalist individualism identified with the North. In a wide-ranging discussion encompassing the blues, sharecropping, and contemporary black intellectuals, Kirby shows how the needful practice of black labor bargaining in the South resulted in a progressive black tradition of verbal negotiation. The conservative separatism and retro-resistance of rural whites, Kirby argues, is embedded in an inherited and adversarial frontier ethos valuing self-sufficiency and access to wilderness. With the southern landscape imaginatively as well as factually linked to social class, crime--particularly forest arson--becomes the most important form of southern white countercultural expression. Kirby continues his look at white resistance in a review of "redneck" discourse, examining the public reputation of southern whites through a range of cultural phenomena, from literature to country music to the computer network known as BUBBA-L. Original, personal, and artfully written, The Countercultural South offers fresh reflections on southern exceptionalism in American political life and culture.
Author: Jerrold Hirsch
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2004-07-21
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 0807861669
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow well do we know our country? Whom do we include when we use the word "American"? These are not just contemporary issues but recurring questions Americans have asked themselves throughout their history--and questions that were addressed when, in 1935, the Roosevelt administration created the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. Although the immediate context of the FWP was work relief, national FWP officials developed programs that spoke to much larger and longer-standing debates over the nature of American identity and culture and the very definition of who was an American. Hirsch reviews the founding of the FWP and the significance of its American Guide series, considering the choices made by administrators who wanted to celebrate diversity as a positive aspect of American cultural identity. In his exploration of the FWP's other writings, Hirsch discusses the project's pioneering use of oral history in interviews with ordinary southerners, ex-slaves, ethnic minorities, and industrial workers. He also examines congressional critics of the FWP vision; the occasional opposition of local Federal Writers, especially in the South; and how the FWP's vision changed in response to the challenge of World War II. In the course of this study, Hirsch raises thought-provoking questions about the relationships between diversity and unity, government and culture, and, ultimately, culture and democracy.
Author: R. Barton Palmer
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2009-04-01
Total Pages: 373
ISBN-13: 0292719213
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNo American dramatist has had more plays adapted than Tennessee Williams, and few modern dramatists have witnessed as much controversy during the adaptation process. His Hollywood legacy, captured in such screen adaptations as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly, Last Summer, reflects the sea change in American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Placing this body of work within relevant contexts ranging from gender and sexuality to censorship, modernism, art cinema, and the Southern Renaissance, Hollywood's Tennessee draws on rarely examined archival research to recast Williams's significance. Providing not only cultural context, the authors also bring to light the details of the arduous screenwriting process Williams experienced, with special emphasis on the Production Code Administration--the powerful censorship office that drew high-profile criticism during the 1950s--and Williams's innovative efforts to bend the code. Going well beyond the scripts themselves, Hollywood's Tennessee showcases findings culled from poster and billboard art, pressbooks, and other production and advertising material. The result is a sweeping account of how Williams's adapted plays were crafted, marketed, and received, as well as the lasting implications of this history for commercial filmmakers and their audiences.
