The Mississippi Quarterly articles from December 2005

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from December 2005

Portrait of a friendship: selected correspondence between Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams.(Essay)
December 22, 2005... In 1999 IN A BOOK CALLED LETTERS OF THE CENTURY: AMERICA 1900-1999, Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler attempted to record the history of the twentieth century as it has been told in correspondence. They maintain that "letters have described...

Simms and the sonnet.(William Gilmore Simms)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS IS BEST KNOWN TODAY AS THE PROLIFIC AUTHOR of such antebellum novels as The Yemassee (1835), Martin Faber(1837), and Woodcraft (1854). In his own time contemporaries lauded these works; for instance, Edgar Allan Poe...

"The civilized uses of irony": Darwinism, Calvinism, and motherhood in Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... IN THE SUMMER OF 1925, THE ATTENTION OF THE ENTIRE COUNTRY WAS fixed on the court case of John T. Scopes, a young biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, charged with the crime of teaching the theory of evolution in a public school. The trial,...

Julia Peterkin's Scarlet Sister Mary: breath, birth, boundaries.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... SOUTH CAROLINA WRITER JULIA PETERKIN ACHIEVED BOTH POPULARITY AND critical praise in the 1920s and 30s; her novel Scarlet Sister Mary-won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1929. Today, though kept in print by the University of Georgia Press, it...

Eudora Welty's "Livvie" and the visual arts.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... IN HER MEMOIR ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS, EUDORA WELTY EXPLAINS, "MY love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page" (9). As a child, she saw the illustrated initials at the...

"But to be released is to tell, to unburden it": storytelling in Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... "... she was not able to tell her story backwards with such simplicity and assurance. Could I even begin to step back into those mists of what I wanted, what I thought I was doing... without thoroughly losing my way?" (Godwin 539) "I was...

Toward the north star: Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path" and the slave narrative tradition.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... IF THERE IS A COMMON THREAD THAT RUNS THROUGH EARLY CRITICAL readings of Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path," it is the conspicuous absence of any discussion of the race of the story's protagonist, Phoenix Jackson. Neil Isaacs, for example, goes to...

Independence Day, 1835: the John A. Murrell conspiracy and the lynching of the Vicksburg gamblers in literature.
December 22, 2005... But this state of the public mind was characteristic of the period of time to which I now refer. It was contemporaneous with the Murrell excitement.... When the yellow fever prevails as an epidemic, every other disease seems...

Fetching the old southwest in Mexico: the humorous letters of C.M. Haile (1).(Christopher Mason Haile)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... RECENTLY, SOME SCHOLARS (DEBORAH COHN, BARBARA LADD, JOHN LOWE, Christopher Iannini, among others) have expanded the locus of Southern studies to encompass areas south of the US South--Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. (2) A...

Beginnings and endings in Flannery O'Connor.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... IN ALL NARRATIVES, BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS ARE CRITICAL MOMENTS, AND the shorter the narrative, the closer the beginning to the ending, the more important their function and their import. Short stories are fast games with high stakes, quickly...

A. R. Ammons's comic strip Glare: lit(t)erary musings about nothing.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... It is as if Men turning into things, as comedy, Stood, dressed in antic symbols, to display The truth about themselves, having lost, as things, That power to conceal they had as men. --Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary...

More than a snapshot: Allen Tate's ironic historical consciousness in The Fathers.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... We do need history, but quite differently from the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge, however grandly they may look down on our rude and unpicturesque requirements. --Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History IN THE EARLY...

The story as cure in Richard Ford's "Occidentals".(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... IN HER BOOK ON RICHARD FORD, ELINOR ANN WALKER OBSERVES THAT, "[I]N texts as diverse as Wildlife, the Rock Springs stories, the Frank Bascombe books, and Women with Men, characters ponder how to know themselves, how to know others" (203). And...

Designs against Tara: Frances Gaither's The Red Cock Crows and other counternarratives to Gone with the Wind.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... IN 2001, ALICE RANDALL'S THE WIND DONE GONE--A PARODIC rejoinder to Margaret Mitchell's perennially popular 1936 melodrama, Gone with the Wind--re-ignited cultural debates about representations of race and slavery in American fiction, as well...

Epic Tears: The Dislocation of Meaning in Faulkner's "The Bear".(William Faulkner)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... IN BOOK XVI OF THE ILIAD, AFTER FINALLY CONSENTING THAT PARTROCLUS should kill his son Sarpedon, Zeus grieves for the loss of his mortal child that is about to occur: [H]e wept tears of blood that fell to the ground, for the sake of ...

"Into realms of the semi-celestials": from mortal to mythic in The Awakening.(Critical essay)(Character overview)
December 22, 2005... For she will have to hide herself beneath the earth, Or raise herself on wings into the height of air... Euripides, Medea IN ATTEMPTING TO UNDERSTAND EDNA PONTELLIER'S TRANSFORMATION IN The Awakening, which begins with "A feeling of...

Song from San Francisco: space, time, and character in Eudora Welty's "Music from Spain".(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done --W.B. Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus" EUDORA WELTY CONSIDERED TIME AND PLACE TO BE THE "TWO BASES OF reference upon which the novel, in seeking to come to...

7th Biennial Southern Women Writers Conference at Berry College September 27-29, 2007 2007 Conference Theme: "Homecomings".(Brief article)
December 22, 2005... Featured speakers will include Barbara C. Ewell, Kaye Gibbons, Vertamae Grosvenor, Minrose Gwin, Lorraine Lopez, Jill McCorkle, Harryette Mullen, Brenda Marie Osbey, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Minton Sparks, and A Special Evening with Dr. Maya...

Spencer's Voice at the Back Door and the legacy of Reconstruction.(Elizabeth Spencer)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2005... IN KILLERS OF THE DREAM (1949), HER PROPHETIC ANALYSIS OF THE spiritual and psychological harm that the segregation of the races had worked upon generations of Southerners before her, Lillian Smith describes the "haunted childhood" that...

Southern borders, canonicity, and Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel, assistant editor Bryan Giemza. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006. xxvi, 468 pp. $55.00 cloth. A REVISION OF THE 1979 VOLUME, SOUTHERN WRITERS: A...

The continuing radiance of A.R. Ammons.(Considering the Radiance)(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Considering the Radiance. Ed. David Burak and Roger Gilbert. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005. 352 pp. $27.95. WHEN A. R. AMMONS DIED IN 2001, HE LEFT BEHIND A LARGE BODY OF work--over twenty-five of collections of poetry. This poet...

The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction, by Martyn Bone. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2005. xvi, 268 pp. $49.95. BY RELOCATING THE DISCUSSION OF SOUTHERN "PLACE" FROM THE RURAL South through the New Jersey suburbs of Richard Ford...

Reclaiming the American Farmer: The Reinvention of a Regional Mythology in Twentieth-Century Southern Writing.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Reclaiming the American Farmer: The Reinvention of a Regional Mythology in Twentieth-Century Southern Writing, by Mary Weaks-Baxter. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006. 191 pp. $42.95 cloth. IN RECLAIMING THE AMERICAN FARMER MARY WEAKS-BAXTER...

Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics by Ted Atkinson. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2006. 271 pp. $39.95 hardcover. THIS IS THE FIRST STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FAULKNER'S FICTION and the...

Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by John Lowe.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by John Lowe. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2005.317 pp. $49.95 hardcover. IN THE THIRD AND FINAL SECTION OF JOHN LOWE'S EDITED COLLECTION, Bridging Southern Cultures: An...