The Mississippi Quarterly articles from September 1998

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from September 1998

Joseph Gault, an Unknown Georgia Humorist.
September 22, 1998... In the early Indian lands from Georgia to Mississippi were opened to white settlement. The primitive backwoods conditions of these regions, in close juxtaposition to urban centers of nearly European sophistication, stimulated a literary...

Oliver Hillhouse Prince, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, and the Birth of American Literary Realism(*).
September 22, 1998... In 1882, a sharp-eyed reader noticed a disturbing similarity between some pages in Thomas Hardy's most recent novel, The Trumpet-Major (1880), and a selection called "The Militia Company Drill" in an older book, Georgia Scenes, which had been...

Marriage Plots and National Reunion: The Trope of Romantic Reconciliation in Postbellum Literature(*).
September 22, 1998... Joel Chandler Harris's 1898 short story "A Comedy of War" begins its treatment of the Civil War very traditionally, as a fraternal conflict arising from a "house divided."(1) A family quarrel eventually leads two brothers to join opposite sides...

Tennessee on Tennessee.(Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1998... Tennessee Williams was a prodigious writer of journals, letters, and autobiographical essays. This trait has proven a rich resource for those who seek to understand the work of this man who writes "from the inside out." Because he knew that his...

Boundless Hearts in a Nightmare World: Queer Sentimentalism and Southern Gothicism in Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms.
September 22, 1998... In the 1941 article, "The Gothic South," Louise Bogan declares, "The definite Gothic quality which characterizes so much of the work of writers from the American South has puzzled critics."(1) In addition to puzzling the critics, however, the...

Before the New Criticism: Modernism and the Nashville Group.
September 22, 1998... During the early 1940s, the Nashville group and the New York Intellectuals began what would become one of the most powerful literary partnerships in the country. In Creating Faulkner's Reputation (1988), Lawrence H. Schwartz claims that they...

William Gilmore Simms and the Second Earliest Example of the Pseudo-Latinate Noun Absquatulation in Nineteenth-Century American Letters.
September 22, 1998... The editors of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary cite three examples of the noun absquatulation, which arose from the verb absquatulate or absquotilate, "a factitious word, simulating a L.[atin] form (cf. abscond, gratulate)...

The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology.(Review)
September 22, 1998... The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, edited by William L. Andrews, Minrose C. Gwin, Trudier Harris, Fred Hobson. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. xvi, 1188 pp. $29.95 paper The present is one of those moments when...

Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture, by Peter Applebome. New York: Times Books, 1996. 385 pp. Illustrations. $25.00 cloth The present is one of those moments when anxiety about the South fading...

The Oxford Book of The American South: Testimony, Memory, and Fiction.(Review)
September 22, 1998... The Oxford Book of The American South: Testimony, Memory, and Fiction, edited by Edward L. Ayers and Bradley C. Mittendorf. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. x, 597 pp. $30.00 cloth The present is one of those moments when anxiety...

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, by Tony Horwitz. New York: Pantheon, 1998. $27.50 The present is one of those moments when anxiety about the South fading from cultural relevance has all but been replaced...

A Modern Southern Reader.(Review)
September 22, 1998... A Modern Southern Reader, edited by Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1996. 734 pp. $26.95 paper. [First edition, same publishers, 1986]. The present is one of those moments when anxiety about the South...

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence, edited by James A. Grimshaw, Jr. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. xxvi, 444 pp. $39.95. In his fine introduction to this volume Professor Lewis Simpson observes...

The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry.(Review)
September 22, 1998... The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry, ed. Joan R. Sherman. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. 158 pp. $29.95 To me 1966 was and is an auspicious year. In the spring the...

"To Be An Author": Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt 1889-1905.(Review)
September 22, 1998... "To Be An Author": Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt 1889-1905, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz III. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. xv, 248 pp. To me 1966 was and is an auspicious year. In the spring the...

Sleeping with the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern in Robert Penn Warren.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Sleeping with the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern in Robert Penn Warren, by Lucy Ferris. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. xiv, 162 pp. $28.50 When Robert Penn warren died in 1989, he bequeathed an...

The Blood-Marriage of Earth and Sky: Robert Penn Warren's Later Novels.(Review)
September 22, 1998... The Blood-Marriage of Earth and Sky: Robert Penn Warren's Later Novels, by Leonard Casper. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. xvi, 88 pp. $25.00. When Robert Penn warren died in 1989, he bequeathed an amazingly diverse...

The History of Southern Drama.(Review)
September 22, 1998... The History of Southern Drama, by Charles S. Watson. Lexington: Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1997. xii, 259 pp. $29.95. As every traveler knows--on the highway or into the past--a roadmap is more than handy. It is essential if...

Subject to Negotiation: Reading Feminist Criticism and American Women's Fictions.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Subject to Negotiation: Reading Feminist Criticism and American Women's Fictions, by Elaine Neil Orr. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. xxii, 154 pp. $32.50. The idea that feminist criticism is or can be a negotiating...

Choctaw Genesis: 1500-1700.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Choctaw Genesis: 1500-1700, by Patricia Galloway. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. xv, 411 pp. Index. $65.00 cloth. Early European maps of the southeast, if viewed in the chronological order of their drafting, seem to suggest...

Pastoral and Politics in the Old South.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Pastoral and Politics in the Old South, by John M. Grammer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. xiv, 185 pp. $32.50. Scholars of southern literature will not be surprised to hear that mythic conceptions of "the South" were...

Odd Leaves From the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Odd Leaves From the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor, by Henry Clay Lewis, with introduction by Edwin T. Arnold. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. xi-xlvii, 21-203 pp. $24. 95. Henry Clay Lewis ("Madison Tensas") is a...

Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War, edited by Ward W. Briggs Jr. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia (The Southern Texts Society), 1998. xvi, 432 pp. $47.50. Basil Gildersleeve (1831-1924) A native...

When the Devil Came Down to Dixie: Ben Butler in New Orleans.(Review)
September 22, 1998... When the Devil Came Down to Dixie: Ben Butler in New Orleans, by Chester G. Hearn. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. xii, 260 pp. Bibliography, illustrations, maps. $26.95. As a political appointee, General Benjamin...

Rabbi Max Heller: Reformer, Zionist, Southerner, 1860-1929.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Rabbi Max Heller: Reformer, Zionist, Southerner, 1860-1929, by Bobbie Malone. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. xvii, 275 pp. Illustrations. $29.95. Rabbi Max Heller is a deeply researched and well-written biography of a man...

Lumbermen and Log Sawyers: Life, Labor, and Culture in the North Florida Timber Industry: 1830-1930.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Lumbermen and Log Sawyers: Life, Labor, and Culture in the North Florida Timber Industry, 1830-1930, by Jeffrey A. Drobney. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1997. Illustrations. x, 241 pp. Historians of labor and commerce in the...

Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920, by James L. Leloudis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Illustrations. xvii, 338 pp. $39.95. Historians have long debated the social and...

Joel Chandler Harris: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1977-1996, with Supplement, 1892-1976.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Joel Chandler Hams: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1977-1996, with Supplement, 1892-1976, edited by R. Bruce Bickley Jr. and Hugh T. Keenan. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997. xxii, 186 pp. $69.50. If there is anyone...

Blind Vengeance: The Roy Moody Mail Bomb Murders.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Blind Vengeance: The Roy Moody Mail Bomb Murders, by Ray Jenkins. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. 338 pp. $29.95. It is a credit to the University of Georgia Press that it has published the book under review and to the University...

Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism, edited by Robert B. Jones. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996. xxvii, 130 pp. $25.00 Cane is a central text for students of the Harlem Renaissance, but Jean Toomer's...

Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings by Sherwood Anderson.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings by Sherwood Anderson, edited by Welford Dunaway Taylor and Charles E. Modlin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. xxv, 251 pp. $29.95. Everyone who cares about Anderson's life and work will be...

A Devil and a Good Woman, Too: The Lives of Julia Peterkin.(Review)
September 22, 1998... A Devil and a Good Woman, Too: The Lives of Julia Peterkin, by Susan Millar Williams. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. $29.95 Julia Peterkin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1929 and a pioneer in the realistic portrayal...

Bigmama Didn't Shop at Woolworth's.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Bigmama Didn't Shop at Woolworth's, by Sunny Nash. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1996. 186 pages, photos, $19.95 cloth. In this short set of vignettes about growing up black in the Candy Hill section of the small town...

Dream Garden: The Poetic Vision of Fred Chappell.(Review)
September 22, 1998... Dream Garden: The Poetic Vision of Fred Chappell, ed. Patrick Bizzaro. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. 250 pp. $30.00. Fred Chappell is one of many contemporary American writers to publish poetry and prose fiction, but...