Recently added articles from The Southern Literary Journal:
Birth in the Briar Patch: Charles W. Chesnutt and the problem of racial identity.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... In his speech "The Courts and the Negro," written around 1908, Charles W. Chesnutt faults the American government's geographic location for the limits and widespread denials of the Fourteenth Amendment's power. The government's central location in Washington, D.C. perpetuated racism, ...
The politics of self-identity in Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... I do not want [black men] to imbibe the dangerous draught which has intoxicated their white brothers of this Western world and sent them raving madmen, struggling for life at the expense of their fellows in the stockmarkets and wheat-pits of our great cities. --Paul Laurence ...
Chester Himes's The Third Generation: a dystopic domestic novel.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... For the sake of argument, imagine that you sit down to read a novel, and it opens with the following paragraphs: <Pre>Spring was in the air. The bright morning sunshine had dried thedew and warmed the ground, and crocuses, bordering the front brickwalk, bloomed in ...
Skunked on the New York Cotton Exchange: what really happens to Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury.
Mar 22, 2009; ... The New York Cotton Exchange takes a large chunk out of Jason Compson's day on April 6, 1928 in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Speculation in cotton futures is just one thing more that addles Jason and brings to ruin his nickel-and-dime schemes. For one who craves a profit on ...
Returning south: reading culture in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Despite the obvious differences between Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935) and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), these two ethnographic texts share important and striking similarities, particularly in the ways in which their narrator-reporters not only represent ...
The utopian function of affect in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Despite the prevalence of social themes in her fiction, Carson McCullers has not acquired a reputation as a writer with a progressive social vision. One reason for this view of McCullers's work is that her oblique approach to political matters of race, gender, and class has led many ...
"The most ordinary life imaginable": Cold War culture in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.(Company overview)
Mar 22, 2009; ... There is much to be said for giving up such grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable, a life without the old longings; selling stocks and bonds and mutual funds; quitting work at five o'clock like everyone else. --Walker Percy, The Moviegoer In a ...
"It wasn't God who made honky-tonk angels": musical salvation in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... The one thing that did keep me safe, that gave me a feeling of comfort growing up, was music. Music took me somewhere safe--a place where I was happy and free and comfortable being myself. I knew from a very young age that music was something I wanted to be a part of. It was something that ...
The poor, dirty South.('Poverty and Progress in the U.S. South Since 1920', 'Reading Southern Poverty Between the Wars, 1918-1939')(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars, 1918-1939. Ed. Richard Godden and Martin Crawford. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2006. xvi + 247 pp. $44-95 cloth. Poverty and Progress in the U.S. South since 1920. Ed. Suzanne W. Jones and Mark Newman. Amsterdam: VU UP, 2006. 206 pp. $44.00 ...
Between martyrdom and machismo: black men and the American South.('The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology of Death', 'Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta')(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology of Death. By Abdul R. JanMohamed. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. xvii + 327 pp. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper. Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta. By Riche Richardson. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2007. xi + 296 ...
Discourses of desire: uncovering discursive spaces of race and gender in modern southern fiction.('Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy', 'Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women's Writing')(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy. By Gary M. Ciuba. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2007. x + 287 pp. $47.50 cloth. Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White ...
Re-visioning women and place.('Ordering the Facade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women's Writing', 'Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty')(Book review)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Ordering the Facade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women's Writing. By Katherine Henninger. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007. xxii + 256 pages. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale ...
"The progress of the heat within": the West Indies, yellow fever, and citizenship in William Wells Brown's Clotel.
Sep 22, 2008; ... During certain seasons of the year, all tropical climates are subject to epidemics of a most destructive nature. The inhabitants of New Orleans look with as much certainty for the appearance of the yellow-fever, smallpox, or cholera, in the hot-season, as the Londoner does for fog in the ...
A history of forgetting, and the "awful problem" of "race": a new historical note.
Sep 22, 2008; ... Always historicize! --Fredric Jameson On March 15, 1891, a New York Times reporter described, in vivid detail, a killing in New Orleans: The doors were flung open and one of the avengers, taking aim, shot him through the body. He was not killed outright ...
Southern white women's autobiographies: social equality and social change.
Sep 22, 2008; ... While most claims for equality in the early twentieth century were recorded and urged by African Americans, a handful of white people also registered southern realities and undertook the "messy process by which consciousness changes" (Hall 112-113). My concern here is to examine the life ...
Tension and transcendence: "The Jew" in the fiction of Carson McCullers.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... It is illuminating to consider how Carson McCullers saw the European and American Jew of the 1930s and 1940s, the time during which all her major fiction was conceived and almost all completed. Against a background of rising Fascism and Nazism and the frequently anti-Semitic literature of ...
Charles Chesnutt's dilemma: professional ethics, social justice, and domestic feminism in The Marrow of Tradition.
Sep 22, 2008; ... Only the Black Woman can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.' --Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South Over the ...
The roots of new criticism.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... The rise of New Criticism is now an old story, faded to the black and white of another era. Critics and students think they know New Criticism better than any major literary movement of the past century. By virtue of its phenomenal success New Criticism drew the attention, mainly ...
"[J]us' listenin' tuh you": Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and the gospel impulse.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Don't care how good anybody could play a harp, God would rather to hear a guitar. That brought them back to Tea Cake. How come he couldn't hit that box a lick or two? Well, all right now, make us know it. --Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God For, while ...
Poverty and the boundaries of whiteness.(Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People; Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness)(Book review)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People. By John Hartigan, Jr. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. 359 pp. $89.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. By Matt Wray. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. xiii + 213 pp. $79.95 cloth, $21.95 paper. ...