The Mississippi Quarterly articles from September 1993

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from September 1993

The invisible I: John Crowe Ransom's shadowy speaker.
September 22, 1993... The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry introduces John Crowe Ransom with the claim that his "poems could never be mistaken for anybody else's."(1) As introductions go, it is a good one, yet the poetry itself -- like its creator -- tends to stand...

A "bloody dark pastryman": Cormac McCarthy's recipe for gunpowder and historical fiction in 'Blood Meridian.'
September 22, 1993... Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy's TALE OF A ROUGH GANG, bounty-hunting scalps in the mid-nineteenth-century American Southwest, contains a remarkable character named Judge Holden. Judge Holden's importance in the novel is far greater than his...

Fervor on Chapel Hill.
September 22, 1993... Although the University of North Carolina received the nation's first public matriculate in 1795, following earlier yearnings of Presbyterian schoolmasters, this great Southern state university evolved in the twentieth century. It emerged under...

William Gilmore Simms: deviant paradigms of Southern womanhood?
September 22, 1993... Woman's degradation is in man's idea of his sexual rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1860 William Gilmore Simms (1806-1879) LOVED HIS Southern heritage and remained faithful to its beliefs and values through the bitter war that...

The function of women in Old Southwestern humor: re-reading Porter's 'Big Bear' and 'Quarter Race' collections. (William T. Porter)
September 22, 1993... Old Soutwestern Humor flourished from approximately 1830 to 1860 in local papers such as the La Fayette East Alabamian, in widely read regional publications such as the New Orleans Picayune, and in that national clearinghouse for frontier...

Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou.
September 22, 1993... Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou, by Dolly A. McPherson. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. 176 pp.; "A classic in any culture, one might say, is a place in which the Spirit works," Houston Baker claims in his recent...

Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison.
September 22, 1993... Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison, by Trudier Harris. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. 228 pp.; "A classic in any culture, one might say, is a place in which the Spirit works," Houston Baker claims in his...

The World in Black and White: Rereading "Race" in American Literature, 1638-1867.
September 22, 1993... The Word in Black and While: Reading "Race" in American Literature, 1638-1867, by Dana D. Nelson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 189 pp.; "A classic in any culture, one might say, is a place in which the Spirit works," Houston...

Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing.
September 22, 1993... The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing, by Houston A. Baker, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 239 pp. "A classic in any culture, one might say, is a place in which the Spirit works," Houston Baker claims in his recent...

A Confederate Lady Comes of Age: The Journal of Pauline DeCaradeuc Heyward, 1863-1888.
September 22, 1993... Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992. xxiv, 160 pp. $24.95; A THE IMAGE OF A SOUTHERN BELLE THAT typically first comes to the minds of the vast majority of the reading public is most probably that of Scarlett O'Hara, running...

A Blockaded Family: Life in Southern Alabama During the Civil War.
September 22, 1993... Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 199 1. xxviii, 176 pp. $7.95, paper; THE IMAGE OF A SOUTHERN BELLE THAT typically first comes to the minds of the vast majority of the reading public is most probably that of Scarlett O'Hara, running...

A Woman Rice Planter.
September 22, 1993... Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992. lvxx, 450 pp. $15.95, paper. THE IMAGE OF A SOUTHERN BELLE THAT typically first comes to the minds of the vast majority of the reading public is most probably that of Scarlett O'Hara,...

Render Me My Song: African-American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present.
September 22, 1993... Render Me My Song: African-american Women Writers From Slavery to the Present, by Sandi Russell. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. viii, 229 pp. $18.95 cloth, $9.95 paper. Contemporary African-American women writers have often complained,...

Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelists and History.
September 22, 1993... Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelists and History, by Missy Dehn Kubitscheck. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991, xxiii, 203 pp. $30.00 cloth, $14.95 paper; Contemporary African-American women writers have...

Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature.
September 22, 1993... Mooring and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature, by Karla F. C. Holloway. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. x, 218 pp. $36.00 cloth, $14.00 paper. Contemporary African-American women writers...

Conversations with Elizabeth Spencer.
September 22, 1993... Edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. 238 pp.; Recent work in American Literature has Added an element of self-consciousness to any discussion of regional writing, particularly when such a...

Flannery O'Connor: An Introduction.
September 22, 1993... By Miles Orvell. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. 232 pp.; Recent work in American Literature has Added an element of self-consciousness to any discussion of regional writing, particularly when such a discussion is crossed...

Friendship and Sympathy: Communities of Southern Women Writers.
September 22, 1993... Edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. 326 pp.; Recent work in American Literature has Added an element of self-consciousness to any discussion of regional writing, particularly when such a discussion...

Mary Lee Settle's Beulah Quintet: The Price of Freedom.
September 22, 1993... By Brian Rosenberg. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. 174 pp. Recent work in American Literature has Added an element of self-consciousness to any discussion of regional writing, particularly when such a discussion is...

Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy.
September 22, 1993... Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy, by Jay Tolson. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. 514 pp. $27.50. There are always two lives in a life, the life seen by the "people of the pavement" and the life seen by Richard Cory. In the...

The Idea of Florida in the American Literary Imagination.
September 22, 1993... University Press of Florida, 1992. The Idea of Florida in the American Literary Imagination is an enchanting as well as an informative book. Rowe's style of writing, sharply critical but pleasingly anecdotal, draws the reader into a story...

Mark and Livy: The Love Story of Mark Twain and the Woman Who Almost Tamed Him.
September 22, 1993... Mark and Livy: The Love Story of Mark Twain and the Woman Who Almost Tamed Him, by Resa Willis. New York, Atheneum Publishers/Maxwell Macmillan, 1992. 334 pp. $25.00; It is of course the nature of literary studies relentlessly to refine...

Mark Twain's Aquarium: The Samuel Clemens Angelfish Correspondence, 1905-1910.
September 22, 1993... Mark Twain's Aquarium: The Samuel Clemens Angelfish Correspondence, 1905-1910, ed. John Cooley. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. 297 pp. $24.95. It is of course the nature of literary studies relentlessly to refine and extend the...

Alice Walker.
September 22, 1993... By Donna Haisty Winchell. New York: Twayne, 1992, xiv, 152 pp.; The two books under consideration here confirm (were any further confirmation needed) that studies of black American women writers continue to be an important aspect of...

Down from the Mountaintop: Black Women's Novels in the Wake of the Civil Right Movement, 1966-1989.
September 22, 1993... By Melissan Walker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. vii, 226 pp. $26.00. The two books under consideration here confirm (were any further confirmation needed) that studies of black American women writers continue to be an important...

American Poetry of the Twentieth Century.
September 22, 1993... By Richard Gray. London: Longman, 1990. 424 pp. $17.95 pb. This book is part of the Longman Literature in English Series and is intended to provide students of literature "with a critical introduction to the major genres in their historical...

Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War.
September 22, 1993... The Philippine-American War, lasting officially from February 1889 to July 1902 but in actuality until at least 1906, committed the United States to an expansionist policy viewed by Mark Twain and others as "imperialism." Mark Twain became a...

Idella: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' "Perfect Maid."
September 22, 1993... By Idella Parker, with Mary Keating. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992, 150 pp. Index. Maps and Photographs. $22.95 hardcover; $12.95 paper. Idella Parker's memoir of her experiences in the employment of Marjorie Kinnan...

The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia.
September 22, 1993... By Peter Martin. Colonial Williamsburg Studies in Cheasepeake History and Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. xxiv, 240 pp. $29.95. As Peter Martin points out in the preface to this fine book, the field of early American...

The Kentucky Encyclopedia.
September 22, 1993... Forty years and more have passed since this reviewer first entered the Commonwealth of Kentucky. He was attracted to the friendliness of the people, to the sharply differentiated landscapes of the terrain, and to the astonishing variety of...

The Fleming Lectures: 1937-1990, A Historiographical Essay.
September 22, 1993... By burl Nogle. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. ix, 86 pp. $19.95. In 1935, one year after eighteen historians gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, to establish the Southern Historical Association, Louisiana State University...

The United States South: Regionalism and Identity.
September 22, 1993... Edited by Valeria Genaro Lerda and Tjebbe Westendorp. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1991. Allen Tate's description of the American South as "Uncle Sam's other province," quoted in the conclusion of this collection of papers delivered at the 1990...

Light on the Hill: A History of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
September 22, 1993... Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xv, 370 pp. FOR THOSE OF US WHO EARNED DOCTORATES AT THE University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, William D. Snider's Light on the Hill offers a sobering reminder that this...

Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier, 1740-1789.
September 22, 1993... Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier, 1740-1789, by Albert Tillson, Jr. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991. 228 pp. Notes. Map. Tables. Figure. $30.00. THE COMMUNITY-STUDY GENRE OF WRITING IN THE FIELD of early American...

Through Fire and Flood: The Catholic Church in Frontier Texas, 1836-1900.
September 22, 1993... The Catholic Church in Frontier Texas, 1836-1900, by James Talmadge Moore. College Station, Texas A & M University Press, 1992. 284 pp. $39.50. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE SPANISH LOYALISTS AND the Nationalists in Mexico influenced...

Cherokee Americans: The Eastern Band of Cherokees in the Twentieth Century.
September 22, 1993... Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Cherokee Americans is the sequel to John Finger's 1984 The Eastern Band of Cherokees, 1918-1900. In Cherokee Americans, Finger examines the Eastern Band of Cherokees still living on reservation...

Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round: The Pursuit of Racial Justice in the Rural South.
September 22, 1993... Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. 421 pp. Notes. Index. RICHARD COUTO'S, Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round demonstrates with renewed clarity how illusive the goal of social and racial justice has been in the postbellum South....

Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964 - The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America.
September 22, 1993... Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992. 220 pp. $22.50. Like a Holy Crusade FOCUSES ON Mississipi's Summer Project OF 1964, offering a fresh view of this pivotal period in the Civil Rights movement. Though several earlier studies and movies depict this...

"Honey in the Rock": The Ruby Pickens Tartt Collection of Religious Folk Songs from Sumter County, Alabama.
September 22, 1993... Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1991. xxxvi, 176 pp. $34.95. The folklike projects of the 1930s, part of the WPA's Federal Writers' Project, did this country a service in encouraging local enthusiasts to preserve rural traditions...

Elite Women and the Reform Impulse in Memphis, 1875-1915.
September 22, 1993... Knoxville: University of Tennesse Press, 1991. 178 pp. SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF Clubwoman as Feminist, Karen Blair's seminal work on the significance of nineteenth-century women's associations, historians have been examining a wide range of...