The Mississippi Quarterly articles from March 2007

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from March 2007

Geographic context and ethnic context: Joel Chandler Harris and Alice Walker.
March 22, 2007... ALICE WALKER (BORN IN 1944) AND JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS (BORN IN 1845) are both from Putnam County, Georgia, whose county seat is the town of Eatonton. When Harris was a teenager, he was hired as a printer's apprentice on Joseph Turner's...

Southern fairy tales: Katherine Anne Porter's "The Princess" and Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.
March 22, 2007... IN TRADITIONAL FAIRY TALES, THE BEAUTIFUL AND, ABOVE ALL, INNOCENT heroine often has to undergo an adventure of sorts, a crisis that needs to be mastered in order to reinstate or consolidate the values and norms of the kingdom she lives in. (1)...

Ethnic freaks, white ladies, and the dissolution of southern patriarchy: Eudora Welty's critical commentary on sideshow practices in "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden".
March 22, 2007... IN THE LAST THREE DECADES, TRADITIONAL READINGS OF EUDORA WELTY'S fiction as eschewing the contemporary socio-political realities of the South have been increasingly subjected to sharp scrutiny. Feminist critics started the new interpretative...

"What men dream about doing": a conversation with Ernest J. Gaines.(Interview)
March 22, 2007... IN 1948, AT THE AGE OF FIFTEEN, ERNEST J. GAINES LEFT THE FALSE RIVER plantation on which he was born and traveled to California to search for an education unavailable to African Americans in rural Louisiana. He briefly returned to Riverlake...

The dynamics of Southern friendship in the Civil War novels of Augusta Evans and Jeremiah Clemens.
March 22, 2007... AS MILITARY EVENTS SLOWLY DESTROYED THE CONFEDERACY, TWO NOTABLE Southerners published opposing fictional views of the Civil War. Augusta Jane Evans, a popular writer, defended Confederate nationality in Macaria; or Altars of Sacrifice, and...

Beth Henley's "Sisters of the Winter Madrigal": an exhumed treasure.
March 22, 2007... IF A CRITIC FAMILIAR WITH ONLY REPRESENTATIVE BETH HENLEY PLAYS WERE to chance upon the one-act "Sisters of the Winter Madrigal," he/she probably would not know what to make of it. In theme it belongs with the plays of the 1980s such as Crimes...

Warren's Faulkner.
March 22, 2007... IN AUGUST OF 1946, ROBERT PENN WARREN PUBLISHED HIS INFLUENTIAL review of The Portable Faulkner edited by Malcolm Cowley, the remarkable text that began the revival of William Faulkner's then declining literary reputation. "Cowley's Faulkner,"...

Anne Tyler as social critic: inequality, racism, and alienation in "The Geologist's Maid".
March 22, 2007... ANNE TYLER'S FICTION HAS RECEIVED THE HIGHEST ACCOLADES FOR ITS insightful, witty depiction of middle-class domestic life in the South. Such praise has been qualified, however, by the complaint that Tyler "paint[s] a rosy picture of reality and...

Plantation modernism.
March 22, 2007... OF THE WRITERS WHO OFFERED TRIBUTES TO MARK TWAIN ON THE FAMOUS celebration of his seventieth birthday in 1905, one of the least likely to be recognized today is Virginia Frazer Boyle. Her poem, an unironic seven-stanza paean to Clemens...

Faulkner's wedding hymn again.(NOTES AND DOCUMENTS)
March 22, 2007... WILLIAM FAULKNER USED THE FIRST LINE OF JOHN KEBLE'S HYMN "MATRIMONY" ["The voice that breathed o'er Eden"] several times as a leitmotif in The Sound and the Fury (1929), as has been observed in a recent article by Sally Wolff, Marie Nitschke,...

Do not go gentle into that Celtic twilight.
March 22, 2007... How Celtic Culture Invented Southern Literature, by James p. Cantrell. Pelican, 2005.228 pp. $29.95. JAMES P. CANTRELL'S HOW CELTIC CULTURE INVENTED SOUTHERN LITERATURE is a sort of diatribe, a passionate indictment of perceived trends in...

"Fox fire in my head, but soggy wood on paper": Harriette Simpson Arnow's experiments in the short story.
March 22, 2007... The Collected Short Stories of Harriette Simpson Arnow, edited by Sandra L. Ballard and Haeja K. Chung. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005. 259 pp. $24.95, paper. "IN THE SHORTER FORMS, AS IN THE LONGER ONES, HER...

The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview.
March 22, 2007... The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview, by Michael McFee. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. 200 pp. $29.95. THE TITLE OF MICHAEL MCFEE'S THE NAPKIN MANUSCRIPTS MIGHT STRIKE the unsuspecting reader as...

On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections.
March 22, 2007... On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Alice Hall Petry. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. 224 pp. $21.95 (paper). ACADEMICS HAVE NEVER REALLY KNOWN WHAT TO DO WITH A NOVEL THAT is both critically acclaimed and wildly...