Southern Culture Research Articles

The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature by Tara Powell (review)

Reviewed by: The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature by Tara Powell Kathryn Lee Seidel Powell, Tara. The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. xi + 266 pp. $42.50. This comprehensive survey of the intellectual in southern literature begins with a title that sounds like an oxymoron. As Tara Powell writes, the stereotype of anti-intellectualism in the South persists, in spite of the many novels that, to the contrary, struggle with the myths and fragments of southern history by creating characters who are intellectuals and who wrestle with the world of books and ideas. The scope of this study includes many authors from earlier periods, but the focus rests upon modern authors, most extensively Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Doris Betts, Tim McLaurin, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, Randall Kenan, and Gail Godwin. Powell begins with a chapter on the origins of the southern anti-intellectual traditions prior to the 1950s. The Agrarians had consciously attempted to extol the myth of the South’s gentlemen farmers, but that effort displaced intellectual examination, according to Powell. Any text to the contrary resulted in characters who are exiled or failed intellectuals, such as those found in works as early as those by Edgar Allen Poe, and later in those by Thomas Wolfe and Ralph Ellison. Other authors adopt a satiric or ironic treatment of characters who are educated, as occurs in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! After World War II, Powell identifies the rise of the academic novel, the growth of creative writing programs in the academy, and the presence of “public intellectuals” as the new conditions that lead to writers who define and examine the intellectual life. Novels of the academy, such as those of Doris Betts and Tim McLaurin, and novels of writers who study creative writing, such as Flannery O’Connor and Gail Godwin, provide challenges to anyone who still believes that the South is an intellectual desert. [End Page 314] For example, Powell points out that O’Connor’s many college educated characters, such as Hulga in “Good Country People,” are often convinced of their superiority but limited and incomplete. Walker Percy’s characters, such as Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman and Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer, may be haunted by the old South, but they are just as disconcerted by modern science, existential philosophy, and atheism (Powell 65). African American authors, according to Powell, do not merely write but translate the parallel universes of the “black” and “white” Souths. Powell traces the strong intellectual tradition in literature from African American writers such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. This tradition, with its focus on teachers, literacy, and education, leads to novels such as Alice Walker’s Meridian in which Meridian Hill is committed to ideas, and to the actions that must result from them, often at great expense. Powell ends the study with a discussion of how Gail Godwin’s characters embark on intellectual journeys and often get stuck along the way in cul-de-sacs of idealism, found in books, in creeds, and in narratives about the values of earlier times, often propounded by mothers and other relatives. Godwin’s women not only live their lives but study them and those of surrounding characters, including their mothers and sisters, as in A Mother and Two Daughters, and their husbands, as in The Good Wife. Most students and scholars will find much to appreciate in this book, if only to situate a favorite author in a literary tradition that is not always associated with southernness. The book reminds the reader that southern culture is not all moonshiners and swamp people. Southerners have been particularly introspective. Powell makes the case well that southerners’ commentary on the life of the mind has always been part of southern discourse and continues to this day. The book has extensive notes that enrich the discussions too—so much so, that some of them might more gracefully be located within the text rather than at the back. The bibliography is extensive. Overall, Powell’s study convincingly proves that the South, far...

Moon Pies and Memories

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Pie is an icon in American South, where both its image and its taste evoke memories of country stores and their agrarian worlds. If we Google Pies, 3,060,000 references appear on subjects that range from art and literature to festivals, recipes, and astrology. In his entry on Moon in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Tom Rankin explains that Chattanooga Bakery in Chattanooga marketed product as the original marshmallow sandwich. The delicacy consists of quarter inch of marshmallow sandwiched between two cookies about four inches in diameter. The sandwich is then coated with chocolate, banana, coconut, and vanilla frosting. (1) Earl Mitchell invented moon pie in 1919 when he worked for Chattanooga Bakery. While visiting a company store at a coal mine in Kentucky, Mitchell asked miners what kind of cookie they would like in their lunch pails. They said they preferred a big one. Mitchell then asked what size cookie should be, and miners pointed to moon. His son Ed Mitchell Jr. recalls: Pie was a big seller, especially in coal fields where they didn't make much money. And when they bought something, they wanted to get best bargain. And there they were getting a great big pie for a nickel. I'm sorry dad didn't patent that thing. I'd have a Cadillac on each foot. (2) To explore how Pie has shaped lives of southerners on a personal level, a few years ago I spoke by phone with several friends who generously offered their thoughts about tasty treat and its importance in their lives. Each speaker is a distinguished figure whose work on American South is well known, and they responded warmly to topic. (3) AUTHOR LEE SMITH ON MOON PIES, WHOOPIE PIES, AND HER CHILDHOOD FAMILY TRIPS: I have always loved them. We always ate them as children, and when I think about them I have fond memories. We took our lunch to school, because we never had school lunches. And we had a lot of Pies in our lunches. We took them on car trips because they were all wrapped up in their little wrappers. At a certain point, when everybody in car would start getting really loud, we would get out Pies. In Maine, we noticed an enormously popular thing that is regarded as a particularly Maine item: Whoopie Pie. A Whoopie Pie looks like a giant Pie. They are size of a small cake--not real high like a layer cake. It has two fairly dense chocolate layers with a mixture in between that is very like mixture in a Pie. There are several famous roadside diners that specialize in their version of Whoopie Pie. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THE LATE DOUG MARLETTE, AUTHOR AND CARTOONIST, ON HOW MOON PIES ARE MORE THAN A CLICHE: Over years, Mr. Campbell, president of Pies, would send me big cases of Pies in New York. I introduced a lot of New Yorkers to marshmallow treat. I have a novel [Magic Time, 2006] that is set in Mississippi, and I have a minor incident involving Pies that I couldn't resist putting in because it is just such a part of a backdrop, it has become a cliche. How do you infuse cliches with meaning? That has become my entire job as a cartoonist. Pies are one of those things that we all think we know. I try to do that in cartoon and in novel. It was funny in Northeast, in New York, to see reaction because they had never seen Pies. I had Pies falling from sky, which was inspired by [the cartoonist and satirist] R. Crumb. It is kind of like kudzu. It has a mysterious, mystical quality. It is like a Rorschach test. I am attracted to these things as a professional purveyor of metaphors and symbols. These are all larger than life, more than sum of parts. They are more than marshmallow and cake. My new novel is set in Civil Rights period in Mississippi, and I have one of main characters, a guy who is down from Detroit, become addicted to Pies during his stay. …

"Your Loving Father, Jack": Southern Illinois Farm Life in the 1890s as Seen through the Correspondence of the Jack Pierce family

woods are getting green hereFrom early 1894 to late 1898, southern Illinois farmer John Jack Pierce sent numerous letters to his son, Charles W. Pierce.1 The father occasionally addressed these letters to his fourth son to my boy, and affectionately signed many of correspondence, Your Loving Father, Jack. Other family members and friends also wrote frequently to Charlie Pierce during this time. The letter writing flurry sprung from a simple cause-Jack's twenty-one-year-old son had abruptly left his home in remote Horse Creek area of southern Illinois in early 1894 to work in thriving farming region of Macon County, in central Illinois and, for a briefer period, in Iowa.Going north to places like Macon County was a common practice on part of restless young men who had found themselves growing frustrated working less prosperous soil of southern Illinois region for low wages.2 Farms tended to include more acres in flat relatively treeless prairie region of central and northern Illinois. On other hand, southern Illinois farms, including those in Charlie Pierce's part of state in northeast corner of Jefferson County, were smaller, hillier and often broken up by large sections of woods.3 While overall, Illinois farmers at this time had higher capital than farmers in other states, this was not case in southern portion of state. Census records for 1870 also showed that southern Illinois region, including Jefferson County where Pierce clan lived, was poorest region in state. The average value for real and personal property was $835 for state as a whole but only $563 for extreme southern Illinois counties.4 Soil type made difference. Dennis Nordin and Roy Scott, in their study of development of Midwest farming starting around 1850, noted that Midwest region where Macon County, Illinois, lay was home of the most fertile soil.. .in United States. Conversely, Charlie Pierce's home region's soil in southern Illinois, along with similar soil types in southern Indiana and southern Ohio, did not generally yield much for its occupants. Furthermore, it seldom developed into successful farming operations.5 Few agricultural innovations occurred in these southern regions as a result. Cultural forces may also have also played a role in this. Connecticut native Solon Robinson, who would dedicate his life to improving farming in Indiana, lamented that southern Indiana farmers, and their backward upland south indolent ways were the worst epidemic that ever raged in any country.6 Jane Adams especially emphasized poorer upland southern culture of bottom third tier of Illinois, noting Geographically and culturally it is more part of upland south...than of rich prairie region to its north.7In rich soil regions of Midwest, areas often dominated by New England settlers, innovation seemed commonplace.8 Nordin and Scott observed, in this regard, that investments in agricultural implements and equipment soared between 1850 and 1900 in these places. This dynamic may explain Charlie Pierce's many comments in his letters home regarding greater prosperity north and more up-to date equipment and superior seed varieties available in Macon County. Interestingly, Charlie's New England-raised father was quick to write and tell his son to make these improved seed types available to his kin in southern Illinois.Vast changes were occurring in farming culture at time Pierce letters were written. Susan Sessions Rugh, in her study of nineteenth century farming in Hancock County, Illinois, in west central part of state, contended that one major change involved beginning shift away from family centered farming to a more business centered model.10 Jane Adams, in her case study of rural life in southern Illinois's Union County from 1890 to 1990, however, contended that family, and ensuing community kinship connections within particular rural areas, stood at heart of farming life in southern Illinois and that this dynamic lasted longer than in many other more productive farming regions of nation. …

New Orleans: A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

New Orleans: A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

Faulkner, Jews, and the New Deal: The Regional Commitments of ‘Barn Burning’

In ‘Barn Burning’, Faulkner portrays a South beleaguered by two threats emblematic of modernity: diasporic pooulations and powerful central government. Abner Snopes, who displays many stereotypically Jewish characteristics, embodies an ethnic threat to Southern culture. On the other hand, the iconic embodiment of Southern values in the story, the de Spain mansion, can be seen as a counterthrust against attempts by New Dealers to deploy architectural monumentality in their effort to forge an explicitly national identity. ‘Barn Burning’ repulses racial and cultural incursions in the name of anti-modern regionalism.

Sex, sickness, and slavery: illness in the antebellum South

Marli F. Wiener skillfully integrates the history of medicine with social and intellectual history in this study of how race and sex complicated medical treatment in the antebellum South. Sex, Sickness, and Slavery argues that Southern physicians' scientific training and practice uniquely entitled them to formulate medical justification for the imbalanced racial hierarchies of the period. Challenged with both helping to preserve the slave system (by acknowledging and preserving clear distinctions of race and sex) and enhancing their own authority (with correct medical diagnoses and effective treatment), doctors sought to understand bodies that did not necessarily fit into neat dichotomies or agree with suggested treatments. Focusing on Southern states from Virginia to Alabama, Weiner examines medical and lay perspectives on the body through a range of sources, including medical journals, notes, diaries, daybooks, and letters. These personal and revealing sources show how physicians, medical students, and patients--both free whites and slaves--felt about vulnerability to disease and mental illnesses, how bodily differences between races and sexes were explained, and how emotions, common sense, working conditions, and climate were understood to have an effect on the body. Physicians' authority did not go uncontested, however. Weiner also describes the ways in which laypeople, both black and white, resisted medical authority, clearly refusing to cede explanatory power to doctors without measuring medical views against their own bodily experiences or personal beliefs. Expertly drawing the dynamic tensions during this period in which Southern culture and the demands of slavery often trumped science, Weiner explores how doctors struggled with contradictions as medicine became a key arena for debate over the meanings of male and female, sick and well, black and white, North and South.

Chữ Nôm and the Taming of the South

The early modern Sino-Vietnamese dictionary known as the Chỉ Nam Ngọc Âm Giải Nghĩa contains two prefaces: one written in Literary Sinitic, using Sinitic characters, and one written in Vietnamese, using the “vernacular” script called Chữ Nôm. If read separately, each preface makes independent arguments in favor of “semantosyllabic” graphemes (characters that encode information for both meaning and pronunciation). However, when read as a single, continuous text, the prefaces combine to present a defense of Chữ Nôm—not as a vernacular alternative to Sinitic characters—but as a legitimate augmentation of the intellectual technology they represent, and thus capable of “taming” southern culture and intellectuality into literate civilization

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 9: Literature ed. by M. Thomas Inge

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 9: Literature ed. by M. Thomas Inge

Front porch

front porch Harry L. Watson, Editor Click for larger view View full resolution Historians Dan Pierce and Hardy Jackson debate which sport is more important to the South, football or NASCAR. Should NASCAR win by default, since football is a gift from the North? Army-Navy game, Polo Grounds, New York, 1916, courtesy of the collections of the Library of Congress. [End Page 1] Reflections on the South frequently turn on questions of identity. Is the South really different? Different from what? How so and why? What is "southernness"? Is it disappearing or just changing? What is all this mysticism about "place"? In the early days of Southern Cultures, we were firmly rebuked by an anthropologist named Robert, who told us we had no logical definition of "southern" or "culture," that our entire project was circular and (even worse) essentialist, that we couldn't point to anything solid that consistently set the South apart from other places or southerners from other people, that "southern identity" was all mythology, we were nailing grits to the wall, and so on and so on. All quite true from a certain perspective, I agreed. But wasn't it obvious that many inhabitants of a definable quadrant of the United States claimed to have something in common? If they called it southernness, why couldn't we? Why wasn't it okay to acknowledge their claims and put together a journal to examine them? "Because you're taking the perspective of the natives," he countered decisively, clearly confident that the perspective of anthropology natives would trump what the natives of anywhere else might say. "But, Robert," I replied, "We are the natives." He looked at me, stunned, and had to give up. Natives are natives, after all, and after a certain point you can't argue with them. So that was the end of that conversation—and we've been tacking up grits for almost twenty years now. The articles in this issue are no exception. The authors all share the perspective that there is something different about the South. They don't agree on what it is exactly, but they're sure it's there, and they want to talk about it. Taken together, they demonstrate how many approaches you can take to the protean subject of southern identity or identities, and still have something new to say. A good place to begin this time is at the end, where Ashley Thompson and Melissa Sloan take on the especially fraught and complex question of race and regional identity. Are real "southerners" white? When I ask my students this question, they emphatically say "no," but we all know there's a tendency to talk and think as if they were. In fact, Thompson and Sloan have interviewed numerous black Americans who insist that they are as southern as anyone else. But the authors also find that black and white southerners relate very differently to their region. We all like the weather, the people, and the food, but black southerners explicitly identify with the region through their race and see the struggles and triumphs of black southerners as key to their claim on membership in the region. "We belong to this place because we built it with our sweat and redeemed it with our blood," they seem to say. "Nobody can take it away from us." But white folks are more skittish. Today they don't claim pride in whiteness per se, as earlier generations did, but they seem to do so indirectly by treating race as invisible and claiming pride in a South where race goes unmentioned, but whose whiteness [End Page 2] speaks for itself. Sound confusing? Nothing about identity is simple, as our critic the anthropologist well knew. Wade Clark Roof gives us a more personal take on identity as he explores the vicissitudes of his name as it changed three times in the course of his life. Each one told a different version of his personal history by what it said, what it omitted, and what it got plain wrong. Thompson and Sloan argue that leaving race unmentioned allows white southerners some guilt-free pride, but Roof shows how naming the previously unspeakable...

Re-visioning Southern identity: transatlantic cultural collisions in Barbara Kingsolver'sThe Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver is a Southern writer. Born and raised in Kentucky, her heritage is Southern but her life experience brings a larger, more global dimension to her work. She is from the South, from ‘down there,’ and she has also been ‘out there’, spending many years abroad working various jobs and getting an outsider look at the inside of Southern culture. This cumulation of heritage and knowledge has given birth to texts that explore the intersection between different life stories, different cultural narratives each considered quite local or regional, but which in fact, when confronted or even simply adjoined, allow for cultural exchanges that transcend preconceptions of Southern violence, bigotry or decay. In The Poisonwood Bible, characters are invested in relationships and events the unravelling of which is informed by Southern culture and history and deformed by the influence of the foreign, Africa itself. The history of the American South qua traumatic history is rooted in the genealogy of Kingsolv...

Book Review: The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 18: Media, edited by Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith

New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 18: Media. Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith, eds. Charles Reagan Wilson, series ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 464 pp. $47.50 hbk. $26.95 pbk.For those of us who refer often to Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, published in 1989, a more extensive and updated multivolume set is long awaited. University of North Carolina Press and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi have collaborated again to produce twenty-four new volumes that deal with everything from education to urbanization in the South.The eighteenth volume of the series, Media, is of particular interest to readers of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, although other titles are relevant to interdisciplinary study as well. nineteen volumes published to date, in order, include religion; geography; history; myth, manners, and memory; language; ethnicity; foodways; environment; literature; law and politics; agriculture and industry; music; gender; folklife; urbanization; sports and recreation; education; media; and violence.The 464-page Media volume replaces the previous encyclopedia section that included fewer than one hundred pages about the topic. Some of the entries are significantly updated (e.g., magazines and newspapers, both by journalism historian Sam G. Riley); some are slightly updated, often with the assistance of other scholars (e.g., The Birth of a Nation by Joan L. Silverman); and some are entirely new (e.g., topics such as Cable News Network, James Carville, the Coen brothers, Stephen Colbert, Pat Conroy, Horton Foote, Morgan Freeman, John Grisham, Spike Lee, Carson McCullers and Film, and Oprah Winfrey). Volume editors are Allison Graham, a professor of communication and media studies at the University of Memphis, and Sharon Monteith, a professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham.The strength of the volume is its expansiveness and (with rare exception) its accuracy and careful proofreading. Its weaknesses include (1) an emphasis on film, media celebrities, and popular television programming, often to the near exclusion of broadcast news organizations, magazines, newspapers, and online sites that focus, among other topics, on extended nonfiction writing; (2) recycled bibliographic lists from the earlier encyclopedia; and (3) reliance on scholars in geography, literature, sociology, and other fields without a similar emphasis on well-known scholars in journalism and media studies.Many JMCQ readers conduct interdisciplinary research and have achieved academic degrees in a variety of fields, but most of us understand the irreplaceable perspective provided by media historians and others who focus on media industries. Fortunately, media scholars from the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Memphis; film reviewers such as John Beifuss of the Memphis Commercial Appeal; and culture, film, and media scholars at the University of Nottingham are included in the landmark encyclopedia.Generally, the academic affiliations of the editors and invited contributors outside media studies help to explain the emphasis on film, literature, and media celebrities. Scholars in ethnic studies, gender studies, literature, sociology, and other academic disciplines often teach courses and conduct excellent research in these areas of inquiry. However, for those interested in the contributions that media experts make to the volume Media, it is important to note E. Culpepper Clark of the University of Georgia, Michael Fuhlhage and Lucila Vargas of UNC-Chapel Hill, Thomas J. Hrach of the University of Memphis, Kathleen WoodruffWickham of the University of Mississippi, Lurene Cachola Kelley of the University of Memphis, Sam G. …

The New encyclopedia of southern culture: v.18: Media

The New encyclopedia of southern culture: v.18: Media

Nord et Sud dans la construction de l’identité noire américaine : réflexions sur le Mouvement pour les Droits Civiques

The present article examines the role played by the southern Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the construction of a national African American identity. Through the example of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, it analyzes the Freedom Movement from a North/South perspective, showing that the Movement allowed the convergence and interaction of two specific black identities which had developed in the North and in the South in the wake of the Great Migration. After exposing the main characteristics of these two identities at mid-20th century, the article focuses on the evolution of SNCC and of a selection of its key members to demonstrate how the Movement absorbed and transformed distinctive features of black northern and southern cultures, giving birth, ultimately, to a new black identity in which North and South became united after an era of separate development.

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Sports & Recreation (review)

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Sports & Recreation (review)

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Education (review)

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Education (review)

Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2010–2011

Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2010–2011 Catherine H. Chengges This checklist is based on current listings in on-line bibliographies, research done through Carlson Library at the University of Toledo, and helpful responses from editors and authors. Useful databases included Ebsco, FirstSearch (ArticleFirst, ECO, WorldCat, WorldCat Dissertations and Theses), Google Books, and ProQuest (DAI). 1. Bibliographies Bayne, John Soward. “Checklist: Reynolds Price and Eudora Welty.” Eudora Welty Review 3 (Spring 2011): 213–14. ———. “Eudora Welty: A Checklist of First and Notable Editions.” In “Collecting Eudora Welty.” Firsts: The Book Collector’s Magazine 21.2 (February 2011): 14–25. Chengges, Catherine H. “Checklist of Welty Scholarship 2009–2010.” Eudora Welty Review 3 (Spring 2011): 205–11. McHaney, Pearl A. “Works by Welty: A Continuing Checklist.” Eudora Welty Review 3 (Spring 2011): 203. 2. Books Haltom, Susan, Jane Roy Brown, and Langdon Clay. One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2011. Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction xix Part I—Spring, 1920s Chapter 1. Chestina 3 Chapter 2. “When the Garden Was New” 21 Chapter 3. Progressive Women and Their Roots in Gardening 43 Part II— Summer, 1930s Chapter 4. “Meeting Death Head On” 63 Chapter 5. “Medicine to the Soul” 75 Chapter 6. “You and Me, Here” 101 Part III—Fall, 1940s Chapter 7. “The Subject Was Flowers” 123 Chapter 8. “In the Fall I Will Miss You Then” 139 Chapter 9. “Flowers Are Older Than War” 155 Chapter 10. “Happy and Thankful for Much” 173 Part IV—Winter, Postwar and Beyond Chapter 11. “Not a Garden Any More, but What It Is” 195 Epilogue: “It Would Be Like Hell to Do” 213 Appendices Appendix I: Decades of Welty Plants 235 Appendix II: Original Plant List for 1119 Pinehurst Street 237 Appendix III: Annuals in the Welty Garden 238 Appendix IV: Roses in the Welty Garden 240 Appendix V: Partial List of Plants in Welty Prose 242 Appendix VI: Resources for Historic Landscape Preservation 244 Appendix VII: Discussion Questions for Book Clubs 245 Notes 246 Bibliography 256 Credits 261 Index 262 [End Page 197] Kreyling, Michael. Understanding Eudora Welty. 1999. Columbia: UP of South Carolina, 2011. 3. Articles Akins, Adrienne V. “‘Put Banner on the map!’: Knowledge, Power, and Colonialism in Welty’s Losing Battles.” Eudora Welty Review 3 (Spring 2011): 87–95. ———. “‘We weren’t laughing with them… We’re grieving with you’: Empathy and Comic Vision in Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter.” Southern Literary Journal 43.2 (Spring 2011): 87–104. [End Page 198] Bayne, John Soward. Gravely Concerned: Southern Writers’ Graves. Clemson Digital UP, 2010. 252–53. [Also mentioned ix, xiii, 72, 184, 188, 198] Block, Melissa. “Eudora Welty’s Jackson: The Help in Context.” All Things Considered (NPR) 22 Aug. 2011. [“Where Is the Voice Coming From?”] Claxton, Mae Miller. “Eudora Welty Society.” Eudora Welty Review 3 (Spring 2011): 188–90. Cohoon, Lorinda B. “‘A Woman’s Serious Foot’: Feet and Shoes in Delta Wedding, ‘Asphodel,’ and ‘The Winds.’” Eudora Welty Review 3 (Spring 2011): 33–49. Ewing, Robert C. “Foundation Repairs Due to Expansive Soils: Eudora Welty House, Jackson, Mississippi.” Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities 25 (February 2011): 50–55. Ferris, William. “‘A lengthening chain in the shape of memories’: The Irish and Southern Culture.” Southern Cultures 17 (Spring 2011): 9–29. [21, 25, “Why I Live at the P. O.,” “Bride of the Innisfallen”] Galey, Forrest. “The Eudora Welty Collection at Mississippi Department of Archives and History.” Eudora Welty Review 3 (Spring 2011): 190–98. “The Garden at the Eudora Welty House.” Daffodil Journal 47.3 (March 2011): 227. Goeller, Alison D. “Eudora Who? Reception and Reading in Germany.” Eudora Welty Review 3 (Spring 2011): 131–41. Gretlund, Jan Nordby. “Virtuoso Variations: Welty’s Unstable Texts and Her Outtakes.” Eudora Welty Review 3 (Spring 2011): 117–29. Horan, Richard. “Eudora Welty.” In Seeds: One Man’s Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees that Inspired Famous American Writers from Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011. 300–07. [Also mentioned 12, 216] Humphreys, Josephine. “Reynolds Price, February 1, 1993–January 20, 2011 / Reynolds Price: Shine and Power.” Eudora Welty Review 3 (Spring 2011): 3–4...

Personal Sorrow: Cải Lương and the Politics of North and South Vietnam

The over-amplification of the Vietnamese "reformed opera" cải lương and a critique of its "excessive" nature facilitated the Vietnamese Communist Party's erasure of southern cul­ture and rebuilding of a unified new socialist state at the end of the Vietnam-American war. While cải lương became a metonymy for southern culture and terrain by marking the south as a "melodramatic" space in need of purification, a reformed cải lương was also used by the communist state to call abject and feminized citizens home in the creation of a new, unified nation.

Lillian Smith, Cold War Intellectual

Over past four decades, scholars in southern studies have images of two different Lillian Smiths. (1) The first is Smith liberal humanist, moralist, and therapist, whose worldview derives equally from secularized vision of Christian brotherhood and spiritualized vision of psychoanalysis. She believes in universal human nature, affirms aesthetic value but not ontological reality of difference, and regards equality as human birthright, something that would be self-evident had not neuroses and oppressive social structures--above all, the race/sex/sin spiral endemic to southern culture (Killers 121)--poisoned otherwise spontaneous and healthy relationships. Fond of tributes to human spirit and possessing what Jay Garcia calls transnational dimensions (60), Smith frames South's predicament within global anticolonial struggles and, more abstractly, within imperative that she calls the Twentieth Century dialogue ... [of] relationships not systems (Killers 233). Though committed to civil rights movement and possessing indubitable moral courage, she believes that lasting social change will come neither as result of pragmatic efforts to seize power, nor as consequence of more accurate theory, but rather as sum of individual awakenings, as oppressors and oppressed discover their mutual humanity and learn to form constructive relationships. This is Smith portrayed by Richard King, who finds in her work a moral authority that far outweighed her institutional connections (176), and from different vantage point by Mab Segrest, who lauds her as an important lesbian precursor to contemporary Southern women's literature of wholeness (40). And while this Smith, assimilable to mainstream liberalism of mid-twentieth century, is undoubtedly appealing, she also stands accused of essentialism, naivete, and platitude. Moreover, moral and therapeutic lens through which she views sexuality threatens to render it unsexy, as does soporific earnestness of her prose style. The second Lillian Smith, on other hand, is savvy and transgressive, dissector and connoisseur of grotesque who anticipates obsessions of early twenty-first century academy and reveals, even against her intentions, ideological charade of liberal humanism--all while secretly suspecting, like an appropriately disillusioned post-1968 intellectual, futility of any alternative political program. This Smith, McKay Jenkins claims, is fully engaged with notions that are now considered staples of postmodern racial thought, that constructions of 'Otherness' ... are not only not apart from subject but are located specifically within subject, are indeed something on which subject depends for its very existence (123). One implication of such claim is that Smith resembles Cathy Caruth more than Freud, refusing fantasy that one might ever assimilate one's traumas or be cured of one's neuroses. No matter how often her writing waxes universal and holds out possibility of healed humanity, she does not transcend horrific particularity of South, for her experience--indeed, her body--cannot permit it. In Patricia Yaeger's words, For Smith, to be white southerner is to know and be grotesque--to overwrite, overread, and participate in an economy of cruelty, defensiveness, reaction formation, and overcompensation (246-247). However one might strive against one's immersion in racist system, there can be no escape from grotesque as self-stunting habitus (247), delicious, frightening riddle, space of permeable, ongoing disturbance (249). Whereas first Smith seems like Church Lady, this one seems like an S&M enthusiast. Both of these versions of Smith draw much of their justification from Strange Fruit and Killers of Dream, which remain her most widely-read texts. Their popularity is understandable, for interlocking problems at center of two works--racism, segregation, sexual repression, misogyny and its mirror image, gyneolatry--may indeed be investigated either as crimes that arise when difference is elevated to an essence and made to obscure common humanity, or as illustrations of how differences, no matter how constructed they may be, remain intractably vexing, alluring, and as real as blow to spine. …

Constructing Guerrilla Memory: John Newman Edwards and Missouri's Irregular Lost Cause

Constructing Guerrilla Memory:John Newman Edwards and Missouri's Irregular Lost Cause Matthew C. Hulbert (bio) On May 5, 1889, the Kansas City Times eulogized, "It is not derogation to other good and brave men to say that the death of no man in Missouri would cause genuine pain and grief to so many and so different persons as that of John N. Edwards. Nor will the memory of any be so cherished."1 Edwards—a veteran of Gen. Jo Shelby's Iron Brigade, fire-eating conservative pundit, and prolific myth-maker—stood as a pro-Confederate vanguard in Missouri politics and cultural restoration from the end of the Civil War at Appomattox in 1865 until his death in 1889.2 As author of the controversial Noted Guerrillas, Or, The Warfare of the Border (1877), Edwards's area of expertise was anything but official or Reconstructed. Other postwar movements commemorated fallen Confederates from the regular chain of command, but for the guerrilla, Edwards solemnly proclaimed, "there was no funeral."3 By most accounts, these guerrillas—endemic to the border West but particularly raucous in Missouri—had operated under night skies, utilized non-typical backcountry battlegrounds, and ambushed any alleged Unionist, military or civilian, with signature six-guns blazing.4 Thus, while elite ex-Confederate authors scrambled to produce and harness apotheosized imagery of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis to revamp southern culture, John Newman Edwards focused both gaze and pen squarely on the rowdiest, most reviled irregular figure: the Missouri bushwhacker. To aid in the production of a southern identity for Missouri, Edwards sculpted this bushwhacker to accouter the state with an irregular Lost Cause. It is important to note that Edwards was not himself a bushwhacker—nor even a native Missourian, for that matter. John Newman Edwards was born in Warren County, Virginia, in 1838 and migrated to Lexington, Missouri, sometime around 1855.5 Upon arrival, he found brief employment editing the Expositor, until a group of raiding Kansans, displeased with the newspaper's partisan slant, destroyed its printing press. Not too long after settling in Missouri, Edwards also met the aristocratic Joseph [End Page 58] Shelby; the two were avid hunting companions and lifelong friends. In 1862, Edwards joined Shelby's Confederate cavalry unit, best known as the Iron Brigade, and eventually rose to the rank of major and adjutant.6 While raiding with the Iron Brigade in 1863-64, he came into contact with many of the Missouri bushwhackers he would later spin into martyr and myth. Following Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Shelby and Edwards spearheaded a quixotic attempt at colonization south of the border. Initially, Shelby offered the combat services of the Iron Brigade to the puppet monarch Maximilian—then engaged in a bitter war with Benito Juarez and his Mexican guerrilla fighters—but the soon-to-be-executed emperor declined. Rather than arm the ex-Confederates, he instead accorded land for a colony, which the ex-Rebels named after his wife, Carlota. While in self-imposed Mexican exile, Edwards managed a struggling plantation, wrote politically charged letters to his sisters back in Virginia, and edited an English-Spanish newspaper called the Mexican Times. In 1867, after Maximilian's execution, Edwards and Shelby returned to Missouri.7 By 1868, Edwards had cofounded the Kansas City Times, a literary outlet for his fiery brand of anti-Reconstruction politics and a vehicle for his partisan editorials starring bushwhacker-turned-bandit Jesse James.8 Edwards left the Times in 1873 to edit the St. Louis Dispatch—the move marked the beginning of a long, alcoholism-fueled stint of instability and short-term work.9 Two years later, Edwards fought a duel with Col. Emory Foster over inflammatory remarks; neither shooter drew blood. Edwards, however, demanded another shot before cooler heads (and promises of libation) prevailed and his seconds dissuaded him from further gunplay. In 1877, Edwards published his magnum opus, Noted Guerrillas, Or, The Warfare of the Border, which featured William C. Quantrill, William "Bloody Bill" Anderson, Coleman "Cole" Younger, and his former editorial subjects the James brothers, Frank and Jesse. In his later years, Edwards decried the state-sponsored assassination of Jesse James and subsequently negotiated...

Class, identity, and anxiety at the plantation table: British travellers and antebellum Southern foodways

For British travellers who ventured into Southern cities and onto Southern estates in the several decades leading up to the American Civil War, the complex interplay of Southern–British cultural affinities and differences defied the easy classification of their experience as ‘American’. For the visiting Briton, the experience of the South demanded an experience of the brutal economic system which drove it, and yet in Southern culture the guest often found herself very much at home. British travellers’ experiences of the region's unique culinary practices, in particular, fed into a fledgling imaginative construction of Southern regional identity in terms of nobility, material abundance and good living which was, however, problematised by anxieties surrounding the material basis of Southern food production: the ruthless exploitation of slave labour. The Southern table constituted a site where cognisance of this economic base of Southern agrarianism had to be repressed in order for the British traveller to come to terms with her sensual enjoyment of the proffered meal as well as to fulfil cultural expectations held regarding the graciousness and civility of the guest.