Still in Print

Description

An insightful guidebook to some of the best examples of modern Southern fiction, as selected by an international group of critics

In Still in Print, eighteen southern novels published since 1997 fall under the careful scrutiny of an international cast of accomplished literary critics to identify the very best of recent writings in the genre. These essays highlight the praiseworthy efforts of a pantheon of novelists celebrating and challenging regionality, unearthing manifestations of the past in the present, and looking to the future with wit and healthy skepticism.

Organized around shared themes of history, place, humor, and malaise, the novels discussed here interrogate southern culture and explore the region's promise for the future. Four novels reconsider the Civil War and its aftermath as Charles Frazier, Kaye Gibbons, Josephine Humphreys, and Pam Durban revisit the past and add fresh insights to contemporary discussions of race and gender through their excursions into history. The novels by Steve Yarbrough, Larry Brown, Chris Offutt, Barry Hannah, and James Lee Burke demonstrate a keen sense of place, rooted in a South marked by fundamentalism, poverty, violence, and rampant prejudice but still capable of promise for some unseen future. The comic fiction of George Singleton, Clyde Edgerton, James Wilcox, Donald Harington, and Lewis Nordan shows how southern humor still encompasses customs and speech reflected in concrete places. Ron Rash, Richard Ford, and Cormac McCarthy probe the depths of human existence, often with disturbing results, as they write about protagonists cut off from their own humanity and desperate to reconnect with the human race. Diverse in content but unified in genre, these particular novels have been nominated by the contributors to Still in Print for long-term survival as among the best modern representations of the southern novel.

Featuring:
M. Thomas Inge on Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain
Clara Juncker on Josephine Humphreys's Nowhere Else on Earth
Kathryn McKee on Kaye Gibbons's On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon
Jan Nordby Gretlund on Pam Durban's So Far Back
Tara Powell on Percival Everett's Erasure
Tom Dasher on Steve Yarbrough's The Oxygen Man
Jean Cash on Larry Brown's Fay
Carl Wieck on Chris Offutt's The Good Brother
Owen W. Gilman Jr. on Barry Hannah's Yonder Stands Your Orphan
Hans H. Skei on James Lee Burke's Crusader's Cross
Charles Israel on George Singleton's Work Shirts for Madmen
John Grammer on Clyde Edgerton's The Bible Salesman
Scott Romine on James Wilcox's Heavenly Days
Edwin T. Arnold on Donald Harington's Enduring
Marcel Arbeit on Lewis Nordan's Lightning Song
Thomas Ærvold Bjerre on Ron Rash's One Foot in Eden
Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. on Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land
Richard Gray on Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• América
• J. Edgar
• True Identity
• Lillian Smith (author)
• My Reputation
• Geoffrey Hartman
• James Still
• Fabulation
• Suttree
• The Rest of the Story
• Stagger Lee Shelton
• General officer
• On Writing
• John Barth
• General
• Sherwood Anderson
• American
• Jonathan Safran Foer
• William Styron
• Theodore Dreiser
• Moll Flanders
• Thomas Wolfe
• William Faulkner

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 23 janvier 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781611172645
• Langue: English

Extrait

STILL IN PRINT
STILL IN PRINT
The Southern Novel Today
Edited by Jan Nordby Gretlund

The University of South Carolina Press
© 2010 University of South Carolina
Cloth and paperback editions published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013
www.sc.edu/uscpress
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print editions as follows:
Still in print : the Southern novel today / edited by Jan Nordby Gretlund.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-943-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-57003-944-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. American fiction Southern States History and criticism. 2. American fiction 21st century History and criticism. I. Gretlund, Jan Nordby.
PS261.S6175 2010
813’.609975 dc22
2010015029
ISBN 978-1-61117-264-5 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: A Time of Excellence in Southern Fiction
PART I A Sense of History
Charles Frazier Cold Mountain
M. THOMAS INGE
Josephine Humphreys Nowhere Else on Earth
CLARA JUNCKER
Kaye Gibbons On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon
KATHRYN MCKEE
Pam Durban So Far Back
Jan NORDBY GRETLUND
Percival Everett Erasure
TARA POWELL
PART II A Sense of Place
Steve Yarbrough The Oxygen Man
THOMAS E. DASHE
Larry Brown Fay
JEAN W. CASH
Chris Offutt The Good Brother
CARL WIECK
Barry Hannah Yonder Stands Your Orphan
OWEN W. GILMAN JR.
James Lee Burke Crusader’s Cross
HANS H. SKEI
PART III A Sense of Humor
George Singleton Work Shirts for Madmen
CHARLES ISRAEL
Clyde Edgerton The Bible Salesman
JOHN GRAMMER
James Wilcox Heavenly Days
SCOTT ROMINE
Donald Harington Enduring
EDWIN T. ARNOLD
Lewis Nordan Lightning Song
MARCEL ARBEIT
PART IV A Sense of Malaise
Ron Rash One Foot in Eden
THOMAS ÆRVOLD BJERRE
Richard Ford The Lay of the Land
ROBERT H. BRINKMEYER JR.
Cormac McCarthy The Road
RICHARD GRAY
Contributors
Index
PREFACE
We are eighteen experienced critics of southern literature with many publications behind us. Most of us are southerners, and six of us are Europeans. We are admirers of the great writers of the South and teach the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Madison Jones, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith in short, we deal with most of the classic southern writers on a daily basis and write about them. This means that mostly we work on literature by accepted and universally established authors and that nobody doubts the relevance of our writing about the southern classics.
But here we write about novels published from 1997 to 2009. The fact is many southern novels are published every year, but for the most part their shelf life is unreasonably short. Often a new novel even an excellent one appears in print, drops out of sight immediately, and is not heard about again. This is why my fellow critics and I have decided to stick out our necks and pronounce. We feel an urge to tell you about new novels that deserve to be kept in print.
Our goal was to make a useful book. We asked ourselves a few simple questions: Which good southern writers recently published novels? What can we do to keep those novels in print? What can we do to make people read these new novels? We thought of the lay reader, the guy lost before the screen or behind the sports pages, general readers both outside and within the academy. The eighteen novels we picked are good and should be better known than they are. Thus the idea behind every essay in the book is to convince a potential reader that this one novel is worth reading, that it deserves our attention, and that it is not necessary to have read other novels by the same author or other authors to appreciate that one book.
You may search this book for your favorite southern novel and ask why the editor chose the novels and novelists that appear here. But the critics picked the novels they wanted to write about, so the question should be why did the editor pick these critics to write about today’s southern novel? A short version of my answer follows: I published my first essay on southern literature thirty years ago (it was on Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead”); since then I have kept a keen eye on the literary criticism written on southern literature. I got to know critics by listening to them at conferences, by reviewing their work, and by editing and coediting volumes on Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor (two), Walker Percy, Madison Jones, southern landscapes, and the South in the 1990s, as well as two southern issues of periodicals. Just who the best critics are varies substantially from decade to decade; in the late 1980s and early 1990s women dominated both as novelists and excellent critics. Now, at the end of the first decade after 2000, men clearly dominate both as novelists and critics. I cannot explain the shifting gender distribution in literary achievement, but I know this will probably change again within a few years. As it is the essays in Still in Print have been written not only by prominent established critics but also by talented young critics, who will influence future criticism of the southern novel.
Let me add that the canon of the southern novel is not simply a local product; it is the result of an international collaboration. If you know your literary history, you know that both Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner could thank French critics for their lasting place in world literature. Today the European Union, with almost twice as many readers as the United States, is contributing substantially to the sale and study of the southern novel. Since 1988 there has been a very active and influential European Southern Studies Forum, which reflects the curious fact that more southern fiction is probably being taught at European universities than at American institutions. The reader will notice that Still in Print reflects this situation, as one-third of the essays on new southern novels are by critics from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and the United Kingdom.
We do not want you to get bogged down in the writers’ biographies, but at the beginning of each essay there is a short biographical sketch of the writer, which you can read before you go to the essay, or skip and perhaps pick up again when you have read the novel discussed. The essays introducing the novels are also short but should offer you enough insight into the novels to enable you to decide whether you want to read them. The critic who wrote the essay thinks you should, as the novel deserves your attention and has potential to become a classic. There is, however, little chance of that happening, unless we can manage to keep the novel in print long enough for you and many others to notice it.
We hope teachers and students will note that many themes recur in the selected novels and that it would be easy to select five or six novels for a course or a thesis based on the essays. The arrangement of the essays is based on four overriding topics. The first topic, covering five titles, is “a sense of history,” which could have been called “the past in the present,” “the burden of prejudice,” or even “a sense of justice” regarding both race and gender issues. The second topic, covering five titles, is “a sense of place,” but it might as well be called “a sense of family and community.” The third topic, covering five titles, is “a sense of humor,” and it is about our incongruous everyday lives. Finally, what is immediately apparent as one reads the three titles within the fourth topic, “a sense of malaise,” is an awareness of loss and despair, or alienation and homelessness, or even of a “sickness unto death.”
Some readers will see entirely other potential constellations built into the book. If you rearrange the order of the novels, it is easy to focus on other topics, such as political and religious fundamentalism; identity in marriage; extended family and community relations; sex, violence, and crime; alcoholism; the rural versus the urbanized South, or the way we live now. Several of the novels are initiation stories, and the picaresque is often the style. No two readers will see the exact same topics in these novels, which is one reason the novels deserve our attention and should remain in print. To help you in the shaping of your own personal topic based on the novels considered, we have attached substantial Works Cited and Consulted lists to each essay.
When you ask leading figures in southern literary studies to choose a novel to advocate and nominate for survival, it is not for the editor to ask for discrimination based on race, gender, religion, or age. Many of the essays in this book would not have been submitted if I had not allowed the critics to choose their one novel freely. As a result it is very satisfying to note that the content of each essay turns out, as expected, to be decidedly politically correct on the topics of race, gender, religion, and age.
I thank the contributors to the collection for choosing such excellent novels, and for their ready cooperation, precision, and exactitude. I am indebted, once again, to the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina for their help and hospitality. I also apprecia