The Mississippi Quarterly articles from March 1995

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from March 1995

The common property of the mob: democracy and identity in Poe's "William Wilson."
March 22, 1995... Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut...

Maria Clemm, Poe's aunt: his boon or his bane? (Edgar Allan Poe)
March 22, 1995... I. Poe's Marriage: Maria Clemm's Involvement The conventional and widespread view of Maria Clemm derives from Poe's well-known 1849 sonnet "To My Mother" [i.e., Mrs. Clemm], which he composed early in February, almost exactly two years after...

Through a glass eye, darkly: the skeptic design of 'Life on the Mississippi.'
March 22, 1995... Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi is generally regarded as an uneven, disjointed work, one part cub-pilot memoir, three parts pedestrian reportage. As critics point out, the book was conceived as a journalistic project: Twain would revisit the...

Booker T. Washington's 'The Man Farthest Down' and the transformation of race.
March 22, 1995... In the late summer and early fall of 1910, supported by the Trustees of his Tuskegee Institute, Booker Washington made a grand tour of Europe which lasted about six weeks. Beginning his travels in Britain, including a brief stay at Andrew...

Flannery O'Connor's "Fourth Dimension": the role of sexuality in her fiction.
March 22, 1995... Perhaps largely because of her orthodox Christian beliefs articulated in such essays as "The Fiction Writer and His Country," Flannery O'Connor's fiction has been considered by some to be contrived, predictable - variations on the same redemptive...

Flannery O'Connor: "A Late Encounter" with poststructuralism.
March 22, 1995... The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.(1) Frederick Crews, in his essay "The Power of Flannery O'Connor," argues for the ineluctable resistance of...

"Making a Scene": some thoughts on female sexuality and marriage in Eudora Welty's 'Delta Wedding' and 'The Optimist's Daughter.'
March 22, 1995... It is around sexuality that issues about power are raised in some of their most difficult forms. For it is frequently in their sexuality that women find their feelings and actions seem to belie their aspirations for independence.(1) The human...

Lawrence Wells of Oxford: an interview.(Interview)
March 22, 1995... Since the early decades of this century Oxford, Mississippi, has served as the residence of some of the South's most productive and influential authors. William Faulkner, Stark Young, and John Faulkner placed Oxford permanently on the American...

William Elliott's Carolina Sports By Land and Water.
March 22, 1995... The introduction to this new edition of William Elliott's masterpiece of antebellum Southern realism is a good example of how current cant ideology, pursued too singlemindedly, can both diminish and distort a work. Reading the introduction with...

Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Achievement: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism.
March 22, 1995... In Katherine Anne Porter's life and literary art, two cultural spaces played a major role: Mexico and the South. The incorporation of both geographical domains in Porter's work became expressions of different states of minds and ideological...

The Dragon's Blood: Feminist Intertextuality in Eudora Welty's "The Golden Apples."
March 22, 1995... Eudora Welty now stands at a fork in the literary highway. In front of her, leading in different directions, are two well-worn paths. One is the low road, the way taken by nearly every man or woman who writes and publishes. The other is the high...

Roughing It.
March 22, 1995... This is the kind of scholarly production that could potentially reignite controversies about publicly funded editorial projects. Here is a massively annotated edition of a famous American author's travel narrative that is already available in...

Simms: A Literary Life.
March 22, 1995... Professor Guilds, who devoted many years to the study and editing of the works of William Gilmore Simms, has written a readable and informative life of Simms. Free from the jargon and critical terms often associated with some of today's...

Territorial Ambition: Land and Society in Arkansas, 1800-1840.
March 22, 1995... Charles Bolton's tightly argued Land and Society is sparse and crisp, and stays close to the evidence, much as the frontier settlers about whom he writes must have lived. Acknowledging that Arkansas has yet to escape the stereotype of a shiftless...

Southern Agriculture During the Civil War Era: 1860-1880.
March 22, 1995... The Civil War era saw profound shifts in many areas of American life, but perhaps nowhere more potently than in Southern agriculture. In 1860 the Southern economy was primarily based on cash crops, mainly cotton, cultivated by millions of slaves....

Confederate Hospitals on the Move: Samuel H. Stout and the Army of Tennessee.
March 22, 1995... In his work Two Great Rebel Armies, RICHARD MCMURRY concluded that when the Confederate government divided up its limited resources, "the Army of Tennessee did not get its fair share." The portrait of army life for the Western soldier that...

Simon Baruch: Rebel in the Ranks of Medicine, 1840-1921.
March 22, 1995... In the labor of a lifetime, Patricia Spain Ward has written a delightful biography of an iconoclastic family physician and public health reformer, Simon Baruch. Baruch contributed little to the advance of either medicine or public health, but by...

S. A. Cunningham and the Confederate Heritage.
March 22, 1995... Sumner Archibald Cunningham played a central role in the Confederate memory, memorialization, and mythmaking of the Lost Cause. For forty years his Nashville-based Confederate Veteran (1893-1932) blew reveille for meetings of the United...

Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865-1900.
March 22, 1995... Montgomery's Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree sets out on a noble task: constructing a comprehensive historical portrait of African-American churches from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century. The results are mixed. His work...

Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.
March 22, 1995... For almost 130 years, in stops and starts, the Ku Klux Klan has been a secret nativist fraternal organization nourished on a history of violence, directed variously against African-Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, immigrants, and other selected...

Organizing the Breathless: Cotton Dust, Southern Politics, and the Brown Lung Association.
March 22, 1995... In Organizing the Breathless, University of South Carolina political scientist Robert Botsch undertakes an institutional case study of the Brown Lung Association (BLA), an organization formed to meet the interest group needs of the victims of...

Southern Democrats.
March 22, 1995... As Nicol C. Rae explains in this new study, during the past quarter century one of the anomalies of modern American politics has been the Southern Democratic Party's strength in local elections combined with its weakness in national, mostly...

Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.
March 22, 1995... John Dittmer's Local People is one of the most significant studies yet to appear on the civil rights movement. Its value derives mainly from its grass-roots perspective. Dittmer rests his analysis on the assumption that the civil rights movement...

Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist.
March 22, 1995... Hodding Carter, modern Mississippi's most illustrious newspaperman, has met his first biographer. While not the equal of Carter's own eloquent memoir, Where Main Street Meets the River, this book is particularly helpful in chronicling his...

Italians in the Deep South: Their Impact on Birmingham and the American Culture.
March 22, 1995... Italians in the Deep South is an affectionately written and attractively produced coffee-table book that is the result of several years of research and interviews conducted by Frank Joseph Fede, himself a success story of the community about...

Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990.
March 22, 1995... "It is our thesis," the editors write (p. 378), "that the Voting Rights Act must be seen as a mechanism to insure that the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s did not meet the same fate as that of the First Reconstruction of the 1860s and 1870s."...

"To Kill a Mockingbird": Threatening Boundaries.
March 22, 1995... Within a year of its publication in 1960, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird was translated into ten languages, selling more than 500,000 copies worldwide. By 1975, the novel had gone through ninety-four printings, becoming the third best-selling...