The Scourges Of The South Essays On The Sickly South In History Literature And Popular Culture

Author : Thomas Ærvold Bjerre,Beata Zawadka
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 195 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2014-10-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781443869881

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The Scourges of the South? Essays on “The Sickly South” in History, Literature, and Popular Culture by Thomas Ærvold Bjerre,Beata Zawadka Pdf

In this book, eleven scholars “take their stand” on the controversial issue of disease as it occurs in the context of the American South. Playing on the popular vision of the South as an ill region on several levels, the European and American contributors interpret various aspects of the regional “sickly” culture as not so much southern “problems”, but, rather, southern opportunities, or else, springboards to yet another of the South’s cultural revitalizations, “health”. As Thomas Ærvold Bjerre and Beata Zawadka note in their introduction, the so-called “Healthy South” has never been an easy topic for scholars dealing with the region. One reason for this is that researchers have been taught to approach so formulated a topic no further than to the point when it turns out it is a contradiction in terms, and, indeed, there is much in southern history and the present situation that justifies such an approach. This volume, however, comprises a collective effort of southernist historians, literature experts, and culture critics to transcend the “contradictory” concept of the “Healthy South,” and does so by reinventing the notion of the southern disease and, consequently, the role of the South as a “scourge” in American culture in terms of this culture’s bountiful gift.

Author : Thomas Ærvold Bjerre
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : American literature
ISBN : OCLC:1374402276

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The Scourges of the South? by Thomas Ærvold Bjerre Pdf

Author : Randall Wilhelm,Zackary Vernon
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2018-03-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781611178395

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Summoning the Dead by Randall Wilhelm,Zackary Vernon Pdf

The first book-length examination of the award-winning author of poetry and fiction firmly rooted in Appalachia Since his dramatic appearance on the southern literary stage with his debut novel, One Foot in Eden, Ron Rash has continued a prolific outpouring of award-winning poetry and fiction. His status as a regular on the New York Times Best Sellers list, coupled with his impressive critical acclaim—including two O. Henry Awards and the Frank O'Connor Award for Best International Short Fiction—attests to both his wide readership and his brilliance as a literary craftsman. In Summoning the Dead, editors Randall Wilhelm and Zackary Vernon have assembled the first book-length collection of scholarship on Ron Rash. The volume features the work of respected scholars in southern and Appalachian studies, providing a disparate but related constellation of interdisciplinary approaches to Rash's fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The editors contend that Rash's work is increasingly relevant and important on regional, national, and global levels in part because of its popular and scholarly appeal and also its invaluable social critiques and celebrations, thus warranting academic attention. Wilhelm and Vernon argue that studying Rash is important because he encourages readers and critics alike to understand Appalachia in all its complexity and he consistently provides portrayals of the region that reveal both the beauty of its cultures and landscapes as well as the social and environmental pathologies that it continues to face. The landscapes, peoples, and cultures that emerge in Rash's work represent and respond to not only Appalachia or the South, but also to national and global cultures. Firmly rooted in the mountain South, Rash's artistic vision weaves the truths of the human condition and the perils of the human heart in a poetic language that speaks deeply to us all. Through these essays, offering a range of critical and theoretical approaches that examine important aspects of Rash's work, Wilhelm and Vernon create a foundation for the future of Rash studies. Robert Morgan, Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University and author of fourteen books of poetry and nine volumes of fiction including the New York Times bestselling novel Gap Creek, provides a foreword.

Author : Adam Golub,Heather Richardson Hayton
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2017-02-17
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781476663272

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Monsters in the Classroom by Adam Golub,Heather Richardson Hayton Pdf

Exploring the pedagogical power of the monstrous, this collection of new essays describes innovative teaching strategies that use our cultural fascination with monsters to enhance learning in high school and college courses. The contributors discuss the implications of inviting fearsome creatures into the classroom, showing how they work to create compelling narratives and provide students a framework for analyzing history, culture, and everyday life. Essays explore ways of using the monstrous to teach literature, film, philosophy, theater, art history, religion, foreign language, and other subjects. Some sample syllabi, assignments, and class materials are provided.

Author : Anders Engberg-Pedersen,Kathrin Maurer
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2017-09-27
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781315530635

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Visualizing War by Anders Engberg-Pedersen,Kathrin Maurer Pdf

Wars have always been connected to images. From the representation of war on maps, panoramas, and paintings to the modern visual media of photography, film, and digital screens, images have played a central role in representing combat, military strategy, soldiers, and victims. Such images evoke a whole range of often unexpected emotions from ironic distance to boredom and disappointment. Why is that? This book examines the emotional language of war images, how they entwine with various visual technologies, and how they can build emotional communities. The book engages in a cross-disciplinary dialogue between visual studies, literary studies, and media studies by discussing the links between images, emotions, technology, and community. From these different perspectives, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the nature and workings of war images from 1800 until today, and it offers a frame for thinking about the meaning of the images in contemporary wars.

Author : Constante González Groba,Ewa Barbara Luczak,Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2023-05-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000875102

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Pathologizing Black Bodies by Constante González Groba,Ewa Barbara Luczak,Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis Pdf

Pathologizing Black Bodies reconsiders the black body as a site of cultural and corporeal interchange; one involving violence and oppression, leaving memory and trauma sedimented in cultural conventions, political arrangements, social institutions and, most significantly, materially and symbolically engraved upon the body, with “the self” often deprived of agency and sovereignty. Consisting of three parts, this study focuses on works of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and cultural narratives by mainly African American authors, aiming to highlight the different ways in which race has been pathologized in America and examine how the legacies of plantation ideology have been metaphorically inscribed on black bodies. The variety of analytical approaches and thematic foci with respect to theories and discourses surrounding race and the body allow us to delve into this thorny territory in the hope of gaining perspectives about how African American lives are still shaped and haunted by the legacies of plantation slavery. Furthermore, this volume offers insights into the politics of eugenic corporeality in an illustrative dialogue with the lasting carceral and agricultural effects of life on a plantation. Tracing the degradation and suppression of the black body, both individual and social, this study includes an analysis of the pseudo-scientific discourse of social Darwinism and eugenics; the practice of mass incarceration and the excessive punishment of black bodies; and food apartheid and USDA practices of depriving black farmers of individual autonomy and collective agency. Based on such an interplay of discourses, methodologies and perspectives, this volume aims to use literature to further examine the problematic relationship between race and the body and stress that black lives do indeed matter in the United States.

Author : Mark M. Smith
Publisher : Wiley-Blackwell
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2000-12-19
Category : History
ISBN : 0631219269

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The Old South by Mark M. Smith Pdf

The Old South is a collection of primary documents and previously published essays introducing students to recent themes found in scholarship on the social and cultural history of the Old South. The documents are drawn directly from the essays not only to vividly illustrate the events, but also to show students how historians construct arguments based on archival evidence. Smith introduces the collection with a detailed essay, and provides study questions, suggestions for further reading, a map, and a chronology of significant events creating a highly useful student-friendly reader.

Author : Larry J. Griffin
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : History
ISBN : 0820317292

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The South as an American Problem by Larry J. Griffin Pdf

In this volume, twelve authors take a challenging new look at the South. Departing from the issue that has lately preoccupied observers of the South - the region's waning cultural distinctiveness - the contributors instead look at the dynamics of the region's long-troubled relationship with the rest of the nation. What they discover allows us all to view the current state and future course of the South, as well as its link to the broader culture and polity, in a new light. To envision the concept of the "Problem South," and what it means to those within and without the region, six historians have joined together with a sociologist, an economist, two literary scholars, a legal scholar, and a journalist. Their essays, which range in subject from the South's climate to its religious fundamentalism to its great outpouring of fiction and autobiography, are the products of strong and independent minds that cut across disciplines, disagree among themselves, blend contemporary and historical insights, and confront conventional wisdom and expedient generalities. Although consensus among the contributors was never the goal of this collection, some common themes do suggest themselves. Above all, there is not only a South defined by its geography, history, and society, but also a mythic and metaphoric South - one continually refashioned by national/regional discourse, trends and events. In addition, the South has long been a mirror in which America has viewed itself. The nation has sought, time and again, to change the region, but it has also used the South to expose and modify darker impulses of American culture.

Author : Douglas B. Chambers,Kenneth Watson
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : History
ISBN : 9781617033032

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The Past is Not Dead by Douglas B. Chambers,Kenneth Watson Pdf

"A collection of [twenty-one representative] literary and historical essays that will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Southern Quarterly . . . (founded in 1962) dedicated to southern studies. . . . this essay collection features the best work published in the journal. Essays represent every decade of the journal's history. Topics range from historical essays . . . to literary essays . . . . Important regional subjects . . . are given special attention" --Publisher's note.

Author : James C. Cobb
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2005-10-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0198025017

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Away Down South by James C. Cobb Pdf

From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern identity, served in an engaging blend of history, literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book, written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America. As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War, defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated the Cavalier myth into the cult of the "Lost Cause," which supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I, white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other key figures of "Southern Renaissance" as well as their African American counterparts in the "Harlem Renaissance"--Cobb is the first to show the strong links between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The Southern self-image underwent another sea change in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white supremacy shook the old definition of the "Southern way of life"--but at the same time, African Americans began to examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is everywhere, has the New South become the No South? Here then is a major work by one of America's finest Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the South means to southerners and to America as well.

Author : Craig Thompson Friend,Lorri Glover
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 082032616X

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Southern Manhood by Craig Thompson Friend,Lorri Glover Pdf

Spanning the era from the American Revolution to the Civil War, these nine pathbreaking original essays explore the unexpected, competing, or contradictory ways in which southerners made sense of manhood. Employing a rich variety of methodologies, the contributors look at southern masculinity within African American, white, and Native American communities; on the frontier and in towns; and across boundaries of class and age. Until now, the emerging subdiscipline of southern masculinity studies has been informed mainly by conclusions drawn from research on how the planter class engaged issues of honor, mastery, and patriarchy. But what about men who didn’t own slaves or were themselves enslaved? These essays illuminate the mechanisms through which such men negotiated with overarching conceptions of masculine power. Here the reader encounters Choctaw elites struggling to maintain manly status in the market economy, black and white artisans forging rival communities and competing against the gentry for social recognition, slave men on the southern frontier balancing community expectations against owner domination, and men in a variety of military settings acting out community expectations to secure manly status. As Southern Manhood brings definition to an emerging subdiscipline of southern history, it also pushes the broader field in new directions. All of the essayists take up large themes in antebellum history, including southern womanhood, the advent of consumer culture and market relations, and the emergence of sectional conflict.

Author : Walter J. Fraser,Winfred B. Moore
Publisher : Praeger
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 1981-10-27
Category : History
ISBN : UOM:39015003448035

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From the Old South to the New by Walter J. Fraser,Winfred B. Moore Pdf

This meaty collection of 19 original essays charts continuity and change in the South from the mid-19th century to the present by examining race relations, crime and violence, urban growth, civic and political leadership, mythology, and thought.... These perceptive, suggestive essays provide the best guides available to the changing South. An important book, recommended for university libraries.

Author : James Charles Cobb
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : History
ISBN : 0820321397

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Redefining Southern Culture by James Charles Cobb Pdf

Cobb, "surveys the remarkable story of southern identity and its persistence in the face of sweeping changes in the South's economy, society and political structure."--dust jacket.

Author : Annette Gordon-Reed
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : History
ISBN : 157806581X

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Slavery and the American South by Annette Gordon-Reed Pdf

In 1900 very few historians were exploring the institution of slavery in the South. But in the next half century, the culture of slavery became a dominating theme in Southern historiography. In the 1970s it was the subject of the first Chancellor's Symposium in Southern History held at the University of Mississippi. Since then, scholarly interest in slavery has proliferated ever more widely. In fact, the editor of this retrospective volume states that since the 1970s "the expansion has resulted in a corpus that has a huge number of components-scores, even hundreds, rather than mere dozens." He states that "no such gathering could possibly summarize all the changes of those twenty-five years." Hence, for the Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History in the year 2000, instead of providing historiographical summary, the participants were invited to formulate thoughts arising from their own special interests and experiences. Each paper was complemented by a learned, penetrating reaction. "On balance," the editor avers in his introduction, "reflection about the whole can convey a further sense of the condition of this field of scholarship at the very end of the last century, which was surely an improvement over what prevailed at the beginning." The collection of papers includes the following: "Logic and Experience: Thomas Jefferson's Life in the Law" by Annette Gordon-Reed, with commentary by Peter S. Onuf; "The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery" by James Oakes, with commentary by Walter Johnson; "Reflections on Law, Culture, and Slavery" by Ariela Gross, with commentary by Laura F. Edwards; "Rape in Black and White: Sexual Violence in the Testimony of Enslaved and Free Americans" by Norrece T. Jones, Jr., with commentary by Jan Lewis; "The Long History of a Low Place: Slavery on the South Carolina Coast, 1670-1870" by Robert Olwell, with commentary by William Dusinberre; "Paul Robeson and Richard Wright on the Arts and Slave Culture" by Sterling Stuckey, with commentary by Roger D. Abrahams. Winthrop D. Jordan is William F. Winter Professor of History and professor of African American studies at the University of Mississippi. His previous books include White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 and The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States, and his work has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Daedalus, and the Journal of Southern History, among other periodicals.

Author : J. William Harris
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : History
ISBN : STANFORD:36105132277059

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The Old South by J. William Harris Pdf

This is the second edition of the successful Society and Culture in the Slave South volume of the Rewriting Histories series. Combining established work with that of recent provocative scholarship on the antebellum South, this collection of essays puts students in touch with some of the central debates in this dynamic area.