Georgia's Frontier Women
Georgia's Frontier Women

Author: Ben Marsh

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2012-06-01

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0820343978

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Ranging from Georgia's founding in the 1730s until the American Revolution in the 1770s, Georgia's Frontier Women explores women's changing roles amid the developing demographic, economic, and social circumstances of the colony's settling. Georgia was launched as a unique experiment on the borderlands of the British Atlantic world. Its female population was far more diverse than any in nearby colonies at comparable times in their formation. Ben Marsh tells a complex story of narrowing opportunities for Georgia's women as the colony evolved from uncertainty toward stability in the face of sporadic warfare, changes in government, land speculation, and the arrival of slaves and immigrants in growing numbers. Marsh looks at the experiences of white, black, and Native American women-old and young, married and single, working in and out of the home. Mary Musgrove, who played a crucial role in mediating colonist-Creek relations, and Marie Camuse, a leading figure in Georgia's early silk industry, are among the figures whose life stories Marsh draws on to illustrate how some frontier women broke down economic barriers and wielded authority in exceptional ways. Marsh also looks at how basic assumptions about courtship, marriage, and family varied over time. To early settlers, for example, the search for stability could take them across race, class, or community lines in search of a suitable partner. This would change as emerging elites enforced the regulation of traditional social norms and as white relationships with blacks and Native Americans became more exploitive and adversarial. Many of the qualities that earlier had distinguished Georgia from other southern colonies faded away.

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century
Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century

Author: Nazera Sadiq Wright

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2016-09-08

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 025209901X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Long portrayed as a masculine endeavor, the African American struggle for progress often found expression through an unlikely literary figure: the black girl. Nazera Sadiq Wright uses heavy archival research on a wide range of texts about African American girls to explore this understudied phenomenon. As Wright shows, the figure of the black girl in African American literature provided a powerful avenue for exploring issues like domesticity, femininity, and proper conduct. The characters' actions, however fictional, became a rubric for African American citizenship and racial progress. At the same time, their seeming dependence and insignificance allegorized the unjust treatment of African Americans. Wright reveals fascinating girls who, possessed of a premature knowing and wisdom beyond their years, projected a courage and resiliency that made them exemplary representations of the project of racial advance and citizenship.

The History of Southern Women's Literature
The History of Southern Women's Literature

Author: Carolyn Perry

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2002-03-01

Total Pages: 724

ISBN-13: 9780807127537

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing—these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The history of southern women’s literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies.

A Southern Woman of Letters
A Southern Woman of Letters

Author: Augusta Jane Evans

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9781570034404

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Wilson 1835-1909) is little known now, but was one of the most popular authors of the 19th century, with most of her nine novels becoming best sellers. Sexton (writing, Morehead State U.) selects and annotates letters to her friends, among them well known literary and political figures, that illuminate her life and times. With this volume, the series expands from the 19th to encompass the 20th as well. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Mary Edwards Bryan
Mary Edwards Bryan

Author: Canter Brown Jr.

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2015-10-28

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0813055563

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The publication of Manch in 1880 marked the beginning of Mary Edwards Bryan's rise to prominence as one of nineteenth-century America's best-known writers of mass-market fiction. At a time when women were discouraged from having jobs of their own, she made a name for herself as a thoughtful--and well-paid--editor. Despite her cultivated image as editor of Fashion Bazar and Sunny South, Bryan's early life was fraught with obstacles. In this finely crafted literary biography, Canter Brown Jr. and Larry Eugene Rivers examine Bryan's formative years in Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana, pairing historical insights with selections of her best writing to illustrate how the obstacles she overcame shaped what she wrote. She grew up on a frontier plantation and later lived through the upheavals of secession and war, disruptive affairs with authors and politicians, the tensions of emancipation, and pervading post-war economic disorder. Despite the oppressive men in her life--her abusive father and husband--as well as unabashed limitations regarding the role of women, Bryan ultimately achieved extraordinary literary accomplishments in New York and Atlanta. A story of celebrity amid scandal, success amid disaster, ambition amid despair, this book reintroduces to the world a courageous and creative talent who yearned to express herself while navigating the restrictive morals and conventions of Victorian society.

A Literary History of Mississippi
A Literary History of Mississippi

Author: Lorie Watkins

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2017-05-31

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1496811925

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

With contributions by Ted Atkinson, Robert Bray, Patsy J. Daniels, David A. Davis, Taylor Hagood, Lisa Hinrichsen, Suzanne Marrs, Greg O'Brien, Ted Ownby, Ed Piacentino, Claude Pruitt, Thomas J. Richardson, Donald M. Shaffer, Theresa M. Towner, Terrence T. Tucker, Daniel Cross Turner, Lorie Watkins, and Ellen Weinauer Mississippi is a study in contradictions. One of the richest states when the Civil War began, it emerged as possibly the poorest and remains so today. Geographically diverse, the state encompasses ten distinct landform regions. As people traverse these, they discover varying accents and divergent outlooks. They find pockets of inexhaustible wealth within widespread, grinding poverty. Yet the most illiterate, disadvantaged state has produced arguably the nation's richest literary legacy. Why Mississippi? What does it mean to write in a state of such extremes? To write of racial and economic relations so contradictory and fraught as to defy any logic? Willie Morris often quoted William Faulkner as saying, "To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi." What Faulkner (or more likely Morris) posits is that Mississippi is not separate from the world. The country's fascination with Mississippi persists because the place embodies the very conflicts that plague the nation. This volume examines indigenous literature, Southwest humor, slave narratives, and the literature of the Civil War. Essays on modern and contemporary writers and the state's changing role in southern studies look at more recent literary trends, while essays on key individual authors offer more information on luminaries including Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, and Margaret Walker. Finally, essays on autobiography, poetry, drama, and history span the creative breadth of Mississippi's literature. Written by literary scholars closely connected to the state, the volume offers a history suitable for all readers interested in learning more about Mississippi's great literary tradition.

The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic
The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic

Author: Susan Castillo Street

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-07-26

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 1137477741

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book examines ‘Southern Gothic’ - a term that describes some of the finest works of the American Imagination. But what do ‘Southern’ and ‘Gothic’ mean, and how are they related? Traditionally seen as drawing on the tragedy of slavery and loss, ‘Southern Gothic’ is now a richer, more complex subject. Thirty-five distinguished scholars explore the Southern Gothic, under the categories of Poe and his Legacy; Space and Place; Race; Gender and Sexuality; and Monsters and Voodoo. The essays examine slavery and the laws that supported it, and stories of slaves who rebelled and those who escaped. Also present are the often-neglected issues of the Native American presence in the South, socioeconomic class, the distinctions among the several regions of the South, same-sex relationships, and norms of gendered behaviour. This handbook covers not only iconic figures of Southern literature but also other less well-known writers, and examines gothic imagery in film and in contemporary television programmes such as True Blood and True Detective.