Dirt and desire : reconstructing southern women's writing, 1930-1990 / Patricia Yaeger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Yaeger, Patricia.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--Southern States--History and criticism.

American fiction.

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

Women and literature.

American fiction--Women authors--History and criticism.

American fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Race in literature.

Southern States--In literature.

Southern States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (344 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The story of southern writing-the Dixie Limited, if you will-runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture. For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt-who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it. Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies. The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One Southern Women Writers: A Confederacy of Water Moccasins

Chapter Two. Dynamiting the Rails: Desegregating Southern Literary Studies

Chapter Three. "And Every Baby ... Was Floating Round in the Water, Drowned": Throwaway Bodies in Southern Fiction

Chapter Four. Race and the Cloud of Unknowing

Chapter Five. Beyond the Hummingbird: Southern Gargantuas

Chapter Six. Politics in the Kitchen: Roosevelt, McCullers, and Surrealist History

Chapter Seven. White Objects, Black Ownership: Object Politics in Southern Fiction

Chapter Eight. The Body as Testimony

Chapter Nine. Studying the Waffle house Chain, or Dirt as Desire in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612070297

9781282070295

1282070290

9780226944920

0226944921

OCLC:

368762807