My Tears Spoiled My Aim And Other Reflections On Southern Culture

Still the South.

With characteristic tongue-in-cheek wit, Reed tackles the questions, Just what is "the South" today? Where is it? Why are Southerners so devoted to it? Instructional maps include "Where Kudzu Grows" and "States Mentioned in Country Music Lyrics."

Offering a comprehensive view of the South's literary landscape, past and present, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture celebrates the region's ever-flourishing literary culture and recognizes the ongoing evolution of the southern literary canon. As new writers draw upon and reshape previous traditions, southern literature has broadened and deepened its connections not just to the American literary mainstream but also to world literatures--a development thoughtfully explored in the essays here. Greatly expanding the content of the literature section in the original Encyclopedia, this volume includes 31 thematic essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical categories, such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and agrarianism; and themes in southern writing, such as food, religion, and sexuality. Most striking is the fivefold increase in the number of biographical entries, which introduce southern novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. Special attention is given to contemporary writers and other individuals who have not been widely covered in previous scholarship.

This book discusses violence and its connection with religion, sport and popular culture. It highlights the religious dimensions of violence and the role of violence in the religion and culture of the American South. Extending into popular culture, it then makes the case that sport—particularly American football—is a cultural phenomenon in the South with close ties with religion and violence, and that American football has come to play a central role in the civil religion of the South, fueled in part by its violent nature. The book concludes by drawing important lessons from this case study—lessons that help us to see both religion and sport in a new light.

The American South has experienced remarkable change over the past half century. Black voter registration has increased, the region's politics have shifted from one-party Democratic to the near-domination of the Republican Party, and in-migration has increased its population manyfold. At the same time, many outward signs of regional distinctiveness have faded--chain restaurants have replaced mom-and-pop diners, and the interstate highway system connects the region to the rest of the country. Given all of these changes, many have argued that southern identity is fading. But here, Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts show how these changes have allowed for new types of southern identity to emerge. For some, identification with the South has become more about a connection to the region's folkways or to place than about policy or ideology. For others, the contemporary South is all of those things at once--a place where many modern-day southerners navigate the region's confusing and omnipresent history. Regardless of how individuals see the South, this study argues that the region's drastic political, racial, and cultural changes have not lessened the importance of southern identity but have played a key role in keeping regional identification relevant in the twenty-first century.

Annotation ContentsIntroduction. The Past as Prologue: Perspectives on Southern Women by Joe P. DunnSpheres of Economic Activity among Southern Women in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction to the Future by Jacqueline JonesStealth in the Political Arsenal of Southern Women: A Retrospective for the Millennium by Sarah Wilkerson-FreemanWorking in the Shadows: Southern Women and Civil Rights by Barbara A. Woods"Separate but Equal" Case Law and the Higher Education of Women in the Twenty-first Century South by Amy Thompson McCandlessThe Changing Character of Farm Life: Rural Southern Women by Melissa WalkerOther Southern Women and the Voices of the Fathers: On Twentieth-Century Writing by Women in the U.S. South by Anne Goodwyn JonesSouthern Women and Religion by Nancy HardestyConclusion by Carol Bleser

From slave narratives to the Civil War, and from country music to Southern sport, this Companion is the definitive guide to the literature and culture of the American South. Includes discussion of the visual arts, music, society, history, and politics in the region Combines treatment of major literary works and historical events with a survey of broader themes, movements and issues Explores the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Huston, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, as well as those - black and white, male and female - who are writing now Co-edited by the esteemed scholar Richard Gray, author of the acclaimed volume, A History of American Literature (Blackwell, 2003)

Never in its long history has the South provided an entirely comfortable home for the intellectual. In this thought-provoking contribution to the field of southern studies, Tara Powell considers the evolving ways that major post--World War II southern writers have portrayed intellectuals -- from Flannery O'Connor's ironic view of "interleckchuls" to Gail Godwin's southerners striving to feel at home in the academic world. Although Walker Percy, like his fellow Catholic writer O'Connor, explicitly rejected the intellectual label for himself, he nonetheless introduced the modern novel of ideas to southern letters, Powell shows, by placing sympathetic, non-caricatured intellectuals at the center of his influential works. North Carolinians Doris Betts and her student Tim McLaurin made their living teaching literature and creative writing in academia, and Betts's fiction often includes dislocated academics while McLaurin's superb memoirs, often funny, frequently point up the limitations of the mind as opposed to the heart and the spirit. Examining works by Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, and Randall Kenan, Powell traces the evolution of the black American literacy narrative from a stress on the post-Emancipation conviction, which saw formal education as an essential means of resisting oppression, to the growing suspicion in the post--civil rights era of literacy acts that may estrange educated blacks from the larger black community. Powell concludes with Godwin, who embraces university life in her fiction as she explores what it means to be a southern female intellectual in the modern world -- a world in which all those markers inscribe isolation.

In The American South, William J. Cooper, Jr. and Thomas E. Terrill demonstrate their belief that it is impossible to divorce the history of the south from the history of the United States. Each volume includes a substantial biographical essay--completely updated for this edition--which provides the reader with a guide to literature on the history of the South. Coverage now includes the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, up-to-date analysis of the persistent racial divisions in the region, and the South's unanticipated role in the 2008 presidential primaries.