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American Studies

University of Mississippi

2013

American Literature

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kyoko Shoji Hearn Jan 2013

Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kyoko Shoji Hearn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the literary works of the two Southern women writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, based on the cultural contexts of the 1930s and the 1940s. It discusses how the two writers' works are in dialogue with each other, and with the particular historical period in which the South had gone through many social, economical, and cultural changes. Hurston and Rawlings, who became friends with each other beyond their racial background in the segregated South, shared physical and social mobility and the interest in the Southern folk cultures. They wrote fiction about the region and its …


Re-Imagining America: Twenty-First Century Disaster And Salvation In Contemporary Fiction, Mary Ellen Gray Jan 2013

Re-Imagining America: Twenty-First Century Disaster And Salvation In Contemporary Fiction, Mary Ellen Gray

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores four contemporary novels set in the American South and analyzes the understandings of American pasts, perceptions of current social and political crises, and projections of possible future paths they contain. Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones tell stories of disasters the natures of which reflect prominent anxieties concerning the twenty-first century position of the United States as a global power. The total destruction leaving behind an unrecognizable nation that McCarthy imagines in his post-apocalyptic novel suggests the viewpoint that the degree to which the U.S. is indicted in the use of unethical practices …