The Mississippi Quarterly articles from December 1995

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from December 1995

Original sin, redemption, and language in Robert Penn Warren's poetry.
December 22, 1995... That Robert Penn Warren was concerned with the Christian concept of original sin is a commonplace of Warren criticism. United in recognizing his frequent employment of the idea, critics differ in how they describe original sin in Warren's work....

"The Angels of Fructification": Tennessee Williams, Tony Kushner, and images of homosexuality on the American stage.
December 22, 1995... Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angelic orders?(1) --Rainer Maria Rilke Still obscured by glistening exhaltations, the angels of fructification had now begun to meet the tumescent phallus of the sun. Vastly the wheels of...

Strangers on Williams's stage. (Tennessee Williams)
December 22, 1995... II. INTRODUCTION: "I STAND IN YOUR PRESENCE A STRANGER, a person unknown!" This complaint by Eloi in Auto-Da-Fe (VI: 140)(2) to his mother (of all persons) reflects the situation of Tennessee Williams during all of his life as well as that of...

The origins of black sharecropping.
December 22, 1995... Sharecropping developed after various other production schemes failed. By 1868, it was the predominant capital-labor arrangement throughout the South. In retrospect, the development of sharecropping seems a tragedy, because it is associated with...

Emotional distance as narrative strategy in Elizabeth Spencer's fiction.
December 22, 1995... In the foreword to The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, Eudora Welty remarks on Spencer's valuable gift that is "not characteristic of the Southerner: this is her capacity for cool detachment."(1) This detachment causes her to pass over emotional...

Humor of the Old Southwest, 3d ed.
December 22, 1995... Third Edition, edited by Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham. University of Georgia Press, 1994. In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye wrote that for the sociologist "Horatio Alger and the writer of the Elsie books may well be more...

From Nationalism to Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of William Gilmore Simms.
December 22, 1995... by Charles Watson. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993. 182 pp. $49.95. Watson here writes: "until the late 1840s, Simms need not have yielded to any of his countrymen in his ardent Americanism." While this statement is true in some...

The Critics Who Made Us: Essays from 'Sewanee Review.'
December 22, 1995... Edited by George Core. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1993. Although these two books come out of seemingly opposed traditions--that edited by George Core from the relatively apolitical Anglo-American literary criticism of...

The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism.
December 22, 1995... By Mark Jancovich. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Although these two books come out of seemingly opposed traditions--that edited by George Core from the relatively apolitical Anglo-American literary criticism of the fifties and...

Selected Letters From a Writer's Life.
December 22, 1995... Edited and with an introduction by Robert Phillips. Afterword by Sir Stephen Spender. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. xlii, 427 pp. Chronology. Photographs. $34.95. From the thousands of letters William Goyen wrote over the course of...

Flannery O'Connor: The Growing Craft.
December 22, 1995... Compiled by Karl-Heinz Westarp. Birmingham: Summa, 1993. xxxviii, 203 pp. $26.95. In the repudiation of Hazel Motes, the bitter recriminations of the Misfit, or the Byzantine tattoo on Parker's back, the confounding event of the Incarnation...

The Narrative Secret of Flannery O'Connor: The Trickster as Interpreter.
December 22, 1995... By Ruthann Knechel Johansen. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. xii, 210 pp. $29.95. In the repudiation of Hazel Motes, the bitter recriminations of the Misfit, or the Byzantine tattoo on Parker's back, the confounding event of the...

American Gargoyles: Flannery O'Connor and the Medieval Grotesque.
December 22, 1995... By Anthony Di Renzo. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. xvii, 250 pp. $34.95. In the repudiation of Hazel Motes, the bitter recriminations of the Misfit, or the Byzantine tattoo on Parker's back, the confounding event of the...

Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer.
December 22, 1995... by Terry Roberts. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. 141 pp. $29.95. In her 1985 study of Elizabeth Spencer, published as a volume in the Twayne United States Author Series, Peggy Prenshaw considers it remarkable that her...

Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South.
December 22, 1995... Victoria E. Bynum, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Historians who focus their attention on women's history seem to have a greater tendency than others to find historical reality in the lives of ordinary people. In part,...

Tara Revisited: Women, War and the PLantation Legend.
December 22, 1995... Catherine Clinton, New York: Abbeville Press, 1995. Historians who focus their attention on women's history seem to have a greater tendency than others to find historical reality in the lives of ordinary people. In part, of course, this is a...

Lucy Breckenridge of Grove Hill: The Journal of a Virginia Girl, 1862-1864.
December 22, 1995... Mary D. Robertson, ed., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. Historians who focus their attention on women's history seem to have a greater tendency than others to find historical reality in the lives of ordinary people. In...

An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South.
December 22, 1995... edited by Michael O'Brien. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. The last thirty years has seen an expansion in scholarly attention to American autobiographical literature, an expansion that has become even more pronounced in...

A Confederate Nurse: The Diary of Ada W. Bacot, 1860-63.
December 22, 1995... edited by Jean V. Berlin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. The last thirty years has seen an expansion in scholarly attention to American autobiographical literature, an expansion that has become even more pronounced in the...

A Remembrance of Eden: Harriet Bailey Bullock Daniel's Memories of a Frontier Plantation in Arkansas, 1849-1872.
December 22, 1995... edited by Margaret Jones Bolsterli. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993. The last thirty years has seen an expansion in scholarly attention to American autobiographical literature, an expansion that has become even more pronounced...

Southern Writers and the Machine: Faulkner to Percy.
December 22, 1995... by Jeffrey J. Folks. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. 173 pp. To Judge from the present political climate, America has become a nation schizophrenic about change. It elects--a president (Southern, we might remind ourselves) who runs on a platform of...

Louisiana Women Writers: New Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography.
December 22, 1995... Edited by Dorothy H. Brown and Barbara C. Ewell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. xiv, 328 pp. Illustrations. $32.50. This interesting collection of ten essays on individual Louisiana women writers, accompanied by a...

Jump at the Sun: Zora Neal Hurston's Cosmic Comedy.
December 22, 1995... by John Lowe. Champaign: University of Illinois, 1995. $34.95. John Lowe's impressive study focuses on Zora Neale Hurston s mask of comedy, as he calls it, in her major fiction. Lowe traces the multi-faceted influences of Hurston's concept of...

Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines.
December 22, 1995... Edited by David C. Estes. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994. 282 pp. $45.00. David C. Estes's fine edition gathers fourteen previously unpublished essays on the fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. This edition, which might well...

Margaret Junkin Preston: A Biography.
December 22, 1995... by Mary Price Coulling. Winston-Salem, North Carolina: John F. Blair, Publisher, 1993. xiv, 274 pp. The first full biography of Margaret Preston since Elizabeth Preston Allan's Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston (1903), Mrs....

Mark Twain, Culture and Gender: Envisioning America Through Europe.
December 22, 1995... by J.D. Stahl. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1994. xvii, 231 pp. $35.00. Recently I read that Noam Chomsky insists that he cannot understand Derrida. Downsizing exponentially to fit me, I confess that I am not sure that I grasp the...

General James Grant: Scottish Soldier and Royal Governor of East Florida.
December 22, 1995... by Paul David Nelson. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. Illustrations. xi, 207 pp. $29.95. Best known to Americans because of his 1775 boast to Parliament that he could march from one end of America to the other with only 5,000...

Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780-1865.
December 22, 1995... by Carol Wilson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. vi, 177 pp. $22.00. This Little book offers an informative and concise treatment of one of the most hideous features of life in the antebellum United States. Never secure in their...

Parson Henry Renfro: Free Thinking on the Texas Frontier.
December 22, 1995... by William Clark Griggs. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Illustrations. xxii, 257 pp. $24.95. Henry C. Renfro, 1831-1885, was a minister in the Baptist Church in the Cross Timbers of central Texas during a period of significant...

A Photographic History of South Carolina in the Civil War.
December 22, 1995... by Richard B. McCaslin, with a "Foreword" by the general editors, Carl Moneyhon and Bobby Roberts. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994. xii, 345 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $68.00. A Photographic History...

The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics.
December 22, 1995... by George C. Rable. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. x, 416 pp. $34.95. Not only was there a war going on, but politics, too. This is not a surprise, of course, but a fact frequently downplayed, even overlooked, in basic...

Henry Grady or Tom Watson? The Rhetorical Struggle for the New South.
December 22, 1995... by Ferald J. Bryan. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1994. viii, 167 pp. Index. $14.00. Increasingly concerned with the status of blacks and women and with broad-based socioeconomic trends, recent historians have tended (intentionally...

Southern Labor History and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers.
December 22, 1995... By Michael K. Honey. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Illustrations. xi, 364 pp. $17.95. This is a well-researched and carefully written book. The documentation is overwhelmingly primary with a large amount of archival...

A Black Educator in the Segregated South: Kentucky's Rufus B. Atwood.
December 22, 1995... By Gerald L. Smith. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. xi, 224 pp. $28.00 cloth. Gerald L. Smith of the History Department at the University of Kentucky has written an informative biography of a significant public figure most...

Toward Peacemaking: Presbyterians in the South and National Security, 1945-1983.
December 22, 1995... By Rick L. Nutt. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 1994. 177 pp. $19.95 paper. This study of Southern Presbyterians by a professor at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, is a revised version of his 1986 Vanderbilt University...

A Sacred Trust: Nelson Poynter and the 'St. Petersburg Times.'
December 22, 1995... By Robert N. Pierce. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. XV, 409 PP. $34.95. This book begins on June 15, 1978--The King of Jordan announced his engagement to an American, the Orioles won their thirteenth game in a row, and Nelson...

Mixing the Waters: Environment, Politics, and the Building of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.
December 22, 1995... By Jeffrey K. Stine. Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1993. Illustrations. xiv, 255 pp. $21.95. This well-written, thoroughly researched volume should be required reading in the nation's government classes as a case study on pork-barrel...