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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Writing Southern Race Relations: Stories Ellen Douglas Was Brave Enough To Tell, Suzanne W. Jones
Writing Southern Race Relations: Stories Ellen Douglas Was Brave Enough To Tell, Suzanne W. Jones
English Faculty Publications
When Ellen Douglas started writing, she drew inspiration from the way William Faulkner and other southern writers whom she admired, like Eudora Welty, depicted southern places. Douglas planted all of her fiction firmly in the region of Mississippi that she knew best; her Homochitto is modeled of Natchez, where she was born, and her Philippi on Greenville, where she lived with her husband and their children. But Douglas reacted against the gothic and mythic elements in Faulkner's work and used as her first literary models the great nineteenth-century realists: Dostoevsky, Flaubert, James, and Tolstoy. She admired Eudora Welty, but found …
Race Relations, Suzanne W. Jones
Race Relations, Suzanne W. Jones
English Faculty Publications
Since the early nineteenth century, when white southern writers began to defend slavery, relationships between blacks and whites became a central concern in southern literature. Many nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century works by white writers exacerbated racial prejudice by reproducing southern white society's racist ideology. But other southern writers, both white and black, have attempted to redress this problem by using literature to dismantle stereotypes and to imagine new relationships. The results of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement speeded up the process, suggesting new plots, new endings, and new points of view to southern writers of both races.
Refighting Old Wars: Race Relations And Masculine Conventions In Fiction By Larry Brown And Madison Smartt Bell, Suzanne W. Jones
Refighting Old Wars: Race Relations And Masculine Conventions In Fiction By Larry Brown And Madison Smartt Bell, Suzanne W. Jones
English Faculty Publications
Since the Civil War white male writers of the American South have created fond fictions about childhood friendships that crossed the color line. For example, much of the poignancy of Faulkner's The Unvanquished (1938) comes from Bayard Sartoris's description of the close relationship he had with a black servant boy Ringo in the Mississippi small town that will separate them as they grow older and that from the beginning marked them as different, based on race. After their boyhood games and real Civil War adventures together, Bayard and Ringo grow up to be, not close friends, but master and faithful …