The Many Souths

Class in Southern Culture
1. Auflage 2003
ISBN: 978-3-86057-345-7
Verlag: Stauffenburg

Buch, Englisch, Band 14, 202 Seiten, PB, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 225 mm

Reihe: Transatlantic Perspectives

The present volume is based on lectures given at an international symposium held at the University of Vienna. Cultural and social historians and literary scholars from nine countries deal with a neglected topic, the representation of class in Southern culture, focusing in par­ticular on the marginalized group of ‘poor whites’.

The analysis of early sociological descriptions of Southern society is followed by analyses of literary texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The texts analyzed mirror the pre­occupation of both reactionary and radical authors and journalists with the lower social classes. The critical investigations document the conservative tendencies in a society in which white men from the upper classes were privileged while tenant farmers and African-Americans functioned as the indispensable work force. Several essays also explore the overlapping of social and ethnic conflicts, which in the American South prevented solidarity across racial boundaries. They also examine the experiences of poor whites as reflected in their music, and study the hierarchies in Southern society. To conclude there are several essays in which the new self-confidence of white and black women writers from the lower social classes is illustrated. They exemplify the new voices which nowadays are an integral part of Southern literature, which thus eludes homogenization and demonstrates the pres­ence of multiple voices in a varied literary landscape.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Content:

Waldemar Zacharasiewicz: Preface

Waldemar Zacharasiewicz: Introduction: Class in Southern Culture

Michael O’Brien: Class and the Old South

Kurt Albert Mayer: Augustan Nostalgia and Patrician Disdain in A.B. Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes

Giovanni Fabbi: “Democratic, fair, stalwart and progressive”: South Carolina newspaper The State and the urban middle-class in the World War I years

Robert J. Haws: Sex, Class and Masculinity in Southern Culture

Pia Masiero Marcolin: “White Trash”: the Exemplary Naming of a Class in W. Faulkner’s Wash

Richard Gray: “These are the unknown people”: Erskine Caldwell and the Algebra of Need

Dan Carter: Race, Class and Southern Violence in the 1950s

Wayne Flynt: Class and Race, Text and Context in To Kill a Mockingbird

Ineke Bockting: Class Distinctions and Their Transgression: Code-Switching, Code-Mixing and Style-Shifting in Domestic Fiction of the American South

Jan Nordby Gretlund: Flannery O’Connor and Class: The System Asserts Itself

Charles Reagan Wilson: Saturated Southerners: The South’s Poor Whites in Modern Southern Literature

Martin Crawford: A Class Novel? Cold Mountain Fictions and Appalachian Realities

Marcel Arbeit: “Send the Bloody Intellectuals to Gym”: Harry Crews’s Educated Super(wo)man and Victims of Both Sexes

Constante González Groba: The Dangerous Intersections of Artistic Pretensions and Class Consciousness in Stories by Lee Smith

Anneke Leenhouts: A Different Pedestal: The Southern Lady’s Poorer Sisters Come Into Their Own

Youli Theodosiadou: In a Class by Themselves: “Other­moth­ers” in Shay Youngblood’s The Big Mama Stories