Sites of southern memory : the autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray / Darlene O'Dell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

O'Dell, Darlene, 1962-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American prose literature--Southern States--History and criticism.

American prose literature.

Autobiography--Women authors.

Autobiography.

American prose literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

American prose literature--Women authors.

Women and literature--Southern States--History--20th century.

Women and literature.

Race relations.

Historiography.

Women.

Biography.

Southern States.

History.

American prose literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Women--Southern States--Biography--History and criticism.

Lumpkin, Katharine Du Pre, 1897-1988. Making of a Southerner.

Lumpkin, Katharine Du Pre.

Smith, Lillian (Lillian Eugenia), 1897-1966. Killers of the dream.

Smith, Lillian.

African American women--Biography--History and criticism.

African American women.

African American women--Biography.

Southern States--Biography--History and criticism.

Race relations--Southern States--Historiography.

Murray, Pauli, 1910-1985. Proud shoes.

Murray, Pauli.

Autobiographical memory.

Memory in literature.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xiv, 189 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia, 2001.

Summary:

In southern graveyards through the first decades of the twentieth century, the Confederate South was commemorated by tombstones and memorials, in Confederate flags, and in Memorial Day speeches and burial rituals. Cemeteries spoke the language of southern memory, and identity was displayed in ritualistic form--inscribed on tombs, in texts, and in bodily memories and messages. Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray wove sites of regional memory, particularly Confederate burial sites, into their autobiographies as a way of emphasizing how segregation divided more than just southern landscapes and people. Darlene O'Dell here considers the southern graveyard as one of three sites of memory--the other two being the southern body and southern memoir--upon which the region's catastrophic race relations are inscribed. O'Dell shows how Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray, all witnesses to commemorations of the Confederacy and efforts to maintain the social order of the New South, contended through their autobiographies against Lost Cause versions of southern identity. Sites of Southern Memory elucidates the ways in which these three writers joined in the dialogue on regional memory by placing the dead southern body as a site of memory within their texts. In this unique study of three women whose literary and personal lives were vitally concerned with southern race relations and the struggle for social justice, O'Dell provides a telling portrait of the troubled intellectual, literary, cultural, and social history of the American South.

Contents:

1 In Memory Of... 1

2 His "Flower-Strewn Grave" 41

3 "Forgotten Graves of Memory" 80

4 "Faces of the Tombstones" 104

Epilogue: The Silence of the Graves 144.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 161-179) and index.

ISBN:

081392071X

0813920728

OCLC:

46670970