Volume 48, Issue 1, May 2014

by | May 13, 2014 | Uncategorized

THE POETRY ISSUE

David A. Davis is Associate Professor of English at Mercer University and Editor of the SSSL Newsletter.

On the morning that I interviewed Kevin Young, the excellent webzine Bitter Southerner published their first selection of poetry. In the heading to the issue, the editor noted that southerners revere prose writers, listing a catechism of names—Faulkner, Warren, Welty, Wright, and so on. But the editor contends that “the work of our poets lives largely in academic literary journals, mostly unnoticed by the rest of us.”

Perhaps it would be some consolation if that were true. At the present, southern poetry thrives among creative writing circles, and many of the nation’s most-celebrated poets write in the southern vernacular—Ammons, Komunyakaa, Trethewey, Wright, and so on. Academic literary journals that examine the South, however, give relatively little consideration to southern poetry. At SSSL’s biennial conference, we had more papers on outsider art, three, than poetry, two, and the past four issues of Southern Literary Journal have averaged less than one essay on poetry per issue.

The truth is that southern literary critics don’t discuss poetry nearly as much as we could. This issue of the newsletter brings some attention to poetry with a state of the field column by Daniel Cross Turner and an interview with Kevin Young, revealing that southern poetry is a rich field for investigation. This issue also looks back at our most recent biennial conference with a final column by outgoing president Eric Gary Anderson and an introductory column by Stephanie Rountree, the president of the new Emerging Scholars Organization.

THE FINAL COLUMN

Eric Gary Anderson is Associate Professor of English at George Mason University, Director of the program in Native American and Indigenous Studies, and President of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

Two years ago, I sat down to write my first newsletter column and tried to imagine what being president of SSSL might be like. Today, I find myself trying to imagine what not being president of SSSL might be like. Today is easier. Although organizing an SSSL conference makes me appreciate the wisdom of the biennial that much more, I can also report that two years of planning, organizing, and anticipating a conference is a pretty long time. After catching increasingly clear, if occasionally ambiguous, glimpses of SSSL 2014 over the course of two full years, it’s a bit odd, and a little bittersweet, to watch it recede.

Planning a biennial conference sometimes feels a bit like playing a really, really long game of chicken. But while games of chicken such as the one depicted in Nicholas Ray’s 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause all too often perform reinforcements of multiple status quos, our “Other Souths” planning had much more to do with asking provocative, disruptive questions about our disciplinary means and motives. Where Ray’s film fails as a manifesto, we wanted SSSL 2014 to be the food, and drink, of manifestos. And, happily, it was. Though I don’t think we ended up with any paper proposals on southern California as an Other South, we could have—and of course the 2014 conference program featured numerous papers on Hollywood Souths, along with (flipping back through the program) Asian-American Transnational Souths, Post-Apocalyptic Souths, Diasporic Souths, Posthuman Souths, Pedagogical Souths, Outer Souths, Disposable Souths, Catastrophic Souths, Coastal Souths, Undead Souths, Future Souths, Pop Souths, Swamps and Other Southern Ecologies, Radical Souths, and many, many other Other Souths.

Ironically, one of the few Souths to get less play this year was my own area of interest, Native Souths. But Native Souths were neither invisible nor absent, for all that; in fact, our keynote speaker Jace Weaver gave us exciting ways of thinking about them as parts of a large and dynamic Red Atlantic. Likewise, Monique Truong’s reading afforded us new and searching ways of imagining and understanding both the “Other” and the “Souths” of our conference theme. Thanks as well to Keith Cartwright, Sharon Holland, Pippa Holloway, Jay Watson, and Michael Bibler, who opened up ways of regarding “Other Souths” through the clarifying and inspiriting lenses of diverse yet interconnected manifestos.

All in all, the program committee—Michael Bibler, Lisa Hinrichsen, Kirstin Squint, and myself— was beyond thrilled by the proposals we received and by the slate of panels we were able to offer. In a twisted way, one of the signs of a good conference is that it asks people to make impossible decisions about which panels to go to and which to miss. We accomplished that, thanks to the dazzling proposals you sent us, and for this we are mildly apologetic and enormously grateful.

Over the past two years, SSSL has added to its repertoire a website (not yoked to a particular university, but with a more freestanding and portable URL) and a very lively Facebook page. In the coming years, you will be hearing more and more about our new, collaboratively-developed Emerging Scholars Organization (ESO), which got off the ground at SSSL 2014 and which already has its first President, the extraordinarily talented Stephanie Rountree of Georgia State University. Our newsletter, under David Davis’s leadership, continues to expand and to become an even more invaluable resource. Our Executive Council, along with our membership at large, continues to imagine an even more vibrant, provocative SSSL into existence. I especially want to thank Katie McKee, who does more than just about anyone realizes to keep SSSL afloat and to help bring us together every two years.

In a nutshell, SSSL has momentum. And, with Jack Matthews as President, we are in terrific hands. Please join me in thanking Jack for his service to the organization, and, again, thanks to all of you for your friendship, support, and good counsel. See you in Boston in 2016!

GLOBAL SOUTH POETRIES AND THE RE-NEW SOUTHERN STUDIES 

Daniel Cross Turner is Associate Professor of English at Coastal Carolina University and author of Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South.

“We’ve got to bring back the Fugitives!” So saith’d professor emeritus, riled, formerly of a prominent research southern institution, in 2012, upon learning I’d written a book on “Southern Poetry.”

“Please stop writing about the Fugitives!” So saith’d associate professor, riled, currently of a prominent Canadian research institution, during the roundtable I organized on “Institutional Southernism” at SSSL 2012 in Nashville.

Time to summon obligatory dueling Faulknerisms?

“The Fugitives are never dead. They’re not even past.”

[Shot reverse shot]

“I dont hate The Fugitives. I dont hate them. I dont. I dont!”

Said book, Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South (2012), contains a brisk, maybe brusque, reckoning of Vanderbilt Fugitive Poetry, squirreled away at the fuzzy tail-end of the introduction. Refiguring the Fugitives was deemed necessary by pretty much everybody along the winding way from “Southern Poetry” diss to book…and hence: by my Vanderbilt dissertation committee, by the University of Tennessee Press in their p.r. for the book, by every review of Southern Crossings I’ve seen thus far. But, temperamentally—which is to say from the vantage of my grad-school generation, theoretically—I find myself agreeing with the Assoc Prof in the Great White Northwest: I, too, want to flee the Fugitives.

If we’ve got to bring back the Fugitives, should we do so less as gravetenders than as graverobbers? Should we make ourselves millennial resurrection-men unburying ragtag shards of their postmortem exquisite corpuses to trade these among the rag-and-bone shops of contemporary “Po Biz” venues? Should current poets become bone re-collectors, rending and rendering textual chunks from Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and young Red Warren to effect an allusive elusiveness to the Ghosts of Southern Poetry Past? Postsouthern past-as-pastiche à la Michael Kreyling, Scott Romine, Martyn Bone, et al?

If we’ve got to bring back the Fugitives, what if they come back wrong? Less lithe spectral echoes of a distant, shimmering pastness, indifferent and intact—that Old New Critical fantasy of a poetic art unstained by the real—than lurching clunky zombies who drag messy materia of the region’s bleak histories along with them, particularly the knotted sinews of economics and race within, and without, the American South, then (the 1920s) and now (the 2010s). For the Fugitives still stalk perceptions of “Southern Poetry” like the undead, as least as far as most critics are concerned. Slow-moving, painstakingly deliberate, yet implacable; speaking some other language, yet articulating incessantly; dead to me, yet hungry as hell. Like so many “inexhaustible bodies that are not / Dead,” the Zombie Fugitives seem eager to out-raven the “ravenous grave.” Outside of the latter-career Robert Penn Warren, the Fugitives have struck me as zombified in all the wrong ways: stilted (stodgy) proformaformalism plus deadwhitemaleness plus a fierce nostalgia for keeping old times in the Land of Cotton notforgotten.

If we’ve got to talk about the Fugitives, then, should we talk trash? Many—most—contemporary poets associated with the U.S. South seem to have little-to-no truck with the Fugitives nowadays—good, bad, or ugly. Charles Wright, for instance, is wondrously oblivious. When I asked his opinion on the future of poetry during our interview, Wright replied: “Oblivion. But oblivion, like Wallace Steven’s bag, has its own warm glow.” But there have been a number of punctum-esque re-visions of the Fugitive tradition, occasions, in some measure, of PoSo past-as-parody. Think of Natasha Trethewey’s “Pastoral” (2006), which adds some pop to a faux photo-op with the Fugitives in twenty-first century ATL, bulldozer droning along in the backdrop, as Trethewey’s mixed-race face colors the monochrome whiteness of the Old Guard. Or the brilliant dark repetitions-with-variations—parodes, let’s say—of the Fugitives’ odes to dead Confederates, such as Derek Walcott’s “Arkansas Testament” (1987) or Kevin Young’s “For the Confederate Dead” (2007). Likewise, Kate Daniels, who walks the self-same halls as the Fugitives at Vanderbilt, has written pointed nonpaeans for them, as has Yusef Komunyakaa, who has criticized the ahistorical aestheticism of “neo-Fugitive” verse.

But why give our bounty to these dead? Another, less poetical, way to ask this might be: Why stay PoSo? Why not go GloSo with poetry, linking up with recent accounts of global Souths as well as southern globalizations? Poetry has been sidled away into second-class status in contemporary lit crit, including or especially studies of current southern lit. The stereotypical formal density and the perceived opacity of reading poems in connection with their socio-historical contexts might be held liable for poetry’s diminishing returns on the literary marketplace, at least on the scholarly side of things.

To be sure, there are serious opportunity costs to our scholarly and teaching pursuits. To some extent, what we read, teach, and publish on is ever a question of economy. In his treatise on the state of southern/American studies Finding Purple America (2013), Jon Smith employs marketing theory to account for forms of intellectual “branding” because “what we choose to ‘work’ on as scholars is, perhaps paradoxically, more closely linked to the anxieties that drive people’s consumption preferences than to any particular account of production” (6). Mustering Douglas Holt’s notion of “populist worlds” (9), Smith implies that these academic allegiances to organizations and journals often lead to a kind of niche marketing that enables scholars to both belong and differentiate themselves.

And I was branded—like cattle—near-immediately upon entering grad school…

[Dissolve]

The Chair, in three-piece powersuit, behind podium at English graduate student orientation for my M.A. at the University of South Carolina: “If you came here because you love books, you’re in the wrong place.”

[Jumpcut]

The Chair, in two-piece powersuit, behind podium at English graduate student orientation for my Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University: “If you came here because you love books, you’re in the wrong place.”

In other words….Professionalize! Professionalize! And this mantra applied, among other things, to intellectual production. All the more so, it appeared, with regard to poetry, which was not then a very popular populist world: “If you came here because you love books of poetry, you’re unquestionably in the wrong place.” At that time, Poeticize! Poeticize! seemed to stone wholly the progress of Professionalize! Professionalize!

Yes, I love books of poetry. I confess absolutely to this. But to poeticize is not NOT to professionalize. We can make, if we’re lucky and good, our avocation our vocation, some poet said. Poetry lines are power lines, though, yes probably it requires some repackaging. The power of diversification in poetry/poetics can run along the following lines, among others, to maintain and amp up currency. Beyond aestheticize (recalling those Old New Critics and/or the new new formalists) and humanize (recognizing the humanity of others), studying/teaching/writing about contemporary southern poetries can enable us to

  • theorize (expounding and expanding anti-essentialist and anti-exceptionalist critiques associated with the New Southern Studies)
  • historicize (interpreting the historicity of various poetic forms and utterances in light of their cultural situatedness, per the New Lyric Studies)
  • multiculturize (carefully heeding Tara McPherson’s warning to avoid merely recognizing “diversity” in a multiculturalist frame, as before we were merely recognizing “humanity” in a humanist frame)
  • re-regionalize (furthering analysis of circum-Caribbeannesss and similar models of hemispheric and global Souths, among other transregional, transnational reorganizations)
  • digital humanize (adapting new media studies to unveil how poetic formations inform and are informed by various other emergent medial formulations and structures)
  • posthumanize (adopting object-oriented ontology to understand how things and the nonhuman environs impact and alter the human domain, including near-and-dear emanations of posthumous posthumanism: i.e., undeadness as featured in Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond, the essay collection I’ve the honor of co-editing with Eric Gary Anderson and Taylor Hagood for Louisiana State University Press)

The seeming roadblocks—theoretical as well as professional/institutional—to engaging with contemporary southern poetries are really only speedbumps, not enough to detour us from taking account of poetry’s significance, which presents an apt model for linking aesthetics with other cultural media. Throwing shade at poetry as somehow unworldly, transcendentally subsisting in some ethereal-ephemeral nethernetherland to airy thinness beat, is way out of alignment with the sheer multiplicity of poetries associated with the U.S. South and the diversity not only of the voluminous volumes themselves, but also of their audiences, critical and popular. This is particularly, pointedly clear in GloSo poetries produced in, through, within, without, between, beyond, the American South.

Keith Cartwright provides an excellent model, if nigh inimitable, for where studies of GloSo poetry studies could lead. Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways (2013) suggests that the humanities need to nurture “a hippikat (Wolof ‘open-eyed’) poetics” that heeds the fractal re-reckonings of the past. Through myriad associations that transfer between various textualities and across national and regional bounds at breakneck speed, Cartwright’s readings, themselves beautiful hybrids between scholarly analysis and creative synthesis that integrate concepts bodied forth from Haitian Vodou as well as U.S. Gulf Coast Voudou, mark “an expansion of scale beyond the space of national sovereignty and beyond the periodicities of history, literary or otherwise” (5). Cartwright deftly examines poems by an array of deep-southern/Caribbean poetries to have us “turning gazes southward—and thankfully southward still, over the waters—to reconsider an aqueous set of relations with the postplantation Caribbean, the other Americas, the Atlantic rim, and the planet at large” (5). We can heed thereby the disparate, resistant strains that counter totalizing models of official historiography, literary or otherwise, through a continuum of contemporary poets of the hemispheric/global South…including, but assuredly not limited to, Trethewey, Komunyakaa, Walcott, Brenda Marie Osbey, Allison Hedge Coke, Virgil Suarez, Kwame Dawes, etc, etc, etc. Such poets, such poetries, rezone southern studies in time and space, crossing centuries and regional/national bounds, thus offering a model for relocating their countercultural, countermemorial practices from the margins towards the center of our field—and, by extension, amending and unabridging what counts as southern.

What’s more, Cartwright’s hippikat poetics resets our connection to “place” from an ecological vantage even as it expands preexisting academic accounts of the field, akin to Ras Michael Brown’s recent history of the African Atlantic, which loops together significant emanations of Black diasporic histories along the permeable bounds of southern coastlines. Atlantic and Gulf basins as open to transnational flows, these coastal Souths’ notable cross-hatching of ethnic traditions, threaded among remarkable ecodiversity, the ecopoetical entwined with the ecopolitical. Akin, as well, to George Handley’s recent work on “new world poetics.” And such imbrications with the nonhuman environs further gesture to Monique Allewaert’s account of the parahuman in Ariel’s Ecology (2013), according to which humans, nonhuman animals, and the environs coalesce into a “more than human collectivity…not grounded on human exceptionalism” (113). The parahuman is acutely in concert with the (trans)southern Black diaspora, for whom “the brutal colonial circumstance of dismemberment and bodily disaggregation” generated models of personhood “that registered a deep skepticism about the desirability of the category of the human” (86).

GloSo poetics, moreover, dovetails with the ways in which institutional alliances and pressures have shifted as the field of Southern Literature has metamorphosed into southern studies, Southern Poetry into southern poetries (lowercase, plural), as our field(s) has adapted to a less regionally anchored, more transnational bent, not merely in theory but also in the institutional settings of its praxis, rerouted from stalwart bastions (Nashville, Chapel Hill, Oxford, Baton Rouge, Atlanta, Athens, Columbia, Charlottesville, etc.) to include new sites of convergence and conflict (Boston, Copenhagen, Sydney, Burnaby, Hanover, etc.). We need likeminded studies that attend to the multitudes of current (trans)southern poetries, revealing the interregional circuitry of the American South. Studies of southern poetries that summon the etymological root of “verse” in “versus,” turning over un(der)tended fertile soil, harrowing old lines of the field, much work yet to be done.

That is to say, at last, poetry offers a widening gyre of possibilities to Re-New Southern Studies. Yes, keep one eye on institutional pressures and ways to rebrand. That’s that. But we’re at a stage where our grad students and emerging scholars know the mantra cold: Always Already Professionalize! They must incessantly measure their careers to calibrate the fields’ zero-point energy…amid state legislatures cutting funding homophobically, targeting first-year book programs in particular and the humanities in general, hiring per the “business model” while devaluing academic experience and achievement. But, prayGod, do not Only Professionalize! That’s that, but that’s not where it’s at. Try: Po-fessionalize! Po-fessionalize! You come too.

Works Cited

Allewaert, Monique. Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Anderson, Eric Gary, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner, eds. Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, under contact.

Brown, Ras Michael. African-American Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Cartwright, Keith. Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways: Travels in Deep Southern Time, Circum-Caribbean Space, Afro-creole Authority. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Handley, George B. New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.

Smith, Jon. Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Turner, Daniel Cross. “Oblivion’s Glow: The (Post)Southern Sides of Charles Wright: An Interview.” storySouth. (2005). Edited by Jake Adam York. Reprinted in Charles Wright in Conversation: Interviews, 1979-2006. Edited by Robert D. Denham. McFarland, 2008. 133-142.

—–. Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012.

INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN YOUNG

Kevin Young is Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. He has published eight volumes of poems, most recently The Book of Hours, and he has edited eight poetry anthologies and a book of essays, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness.

SSSL: As a poet, what does the South signify to you?

Kevin Young: In poetic terms, I think the South has a diverse and interesting history. Just yesterday, I was listening a reading Lucille Clifton gave at Emory almost ten years ago now, and she talked about her mother being from Rome, Georgia. I don’t think about her being a Georgia writer, but she writes so much about the South, and she is certainly inflected by the South and has this interesting point of view. I guess it’s that point of view that I share and admire, whether it’s in the work of poets from the South or poets whose families come from the South.

With the Great Migration we see a lot of African American writers dealing with southern themes, such as exile and home, which certainly inspire me. Both of my parents are from Louisiana, and my first book was about our family there and the generations after generations who lived in two different parishes. I also wanted to write from their particular point of view and their pleasure—an all-black context that was deeply southern, one of movement and exile, but also rootedness.

SSSL: You have written extensively about southern music and vernacular culture. How do these cultural forms influence your poetry?

Kevin Young: I’m centered by and challenged by and comforted by the blues. Writing from the blues has helped me through the tough times, and the challenges that are required to live and to write—for me, the blues are essential. A love of music is part of it but also a love of the ways that the blues center not just black culture but also American culture—the one deeply influencing the other. There isn’t an American music the blues hasn’t touched, and through their offspring jazz and hip-hop, they have influenced world culture. Talking about the blues is a way of talking about life and its tragicomic quality and also about the way something can be so influential that you don’t always see it.

In my own poetry, whether that’s Jelly Roll, with its blues-based love poems, or Dear Darkness, which has a different sort of blues poems, or The Grey Album, essays where I write about the blues, or even this new poetry book, The Book of Hours, which take more a blues sensibility, there is a relationship between the comic moments among the tragic.

SSSL: You wrote a poem titled “For the Confederate Dead,” echoing the title of Allen Tate’s poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” but you wrote the poem from the perspective that suggests Robert Lowell, who wrote “For the Union Dead.” Why?

Kevin Young: I wanted to write back to both of those writers, who I find fascinating even if—or especially because—I find their take on history sometimes troubling. Also, as the poem says, my middle name happens to be Lowell, which is a strange coincidence. When I wrote it I was living in Athens, Georgia, and trying to write about the Confederate monuments and the postbellum plantation mural the poem meditates on, thinking about the questions of history and layers of history, and I was trying to write something that captured the swirl of that history and that moment.  Of course, Lowell was one of Tate’s students, and there is this literary lineage that I was also thinking about—it ended up naming a whole book, where I return to the original idea of “confederate,” including elegies and homages to Gwendolyn Brooks to Phillis Wheatley to my late friend, the writer Philippe Wamba. It’s an elegiac title, after all.

SSSL: You have written many poems that revise/revive history, such as Ardency. How do you think the past speaks?

Kevin Young: I find myself interested in the history of music and the music of history. I think of history as musical in the best sense: it’s choral, with many voices; sometimes there is a solo or two, but really I’m trying to capture a broader sense of song. In Ardency, which is an epic about the Amistad rebels, I was trying to capture not just the individual voices but also of the group as a whole. That’s why I wanted the etched heads on the cover of the book taken from a contemporary account of the mutiny, to see them in profile and anew.

My father-in-law is a historian, and I respect very deeply that process of telling history that has been untold. While the Amistad story isn’t unknown, it isn’t spoken enough about—at least it wasn’t 20 years ago when I first came across the Amistads’ letters from jail. Hearing them speak, or write in a new tongue, spurred me to start the book back then, and kept me working on the long poem all those years.

SSSL: Your family is from Louisiana, but you were born elsewhere, and have lived in many places. Does geography matter to you?

Kevin Young: I think it does. I feel so strangely connected and rooted in those homesteads in Louisiana, some of which we’ve been in for two hundred years, so I don’t see how I couldn’t feel that intense sense of place. My parents were both born at home in houses that I still remember, and only were recently torn down. Place is central to the work of contemporary writers I really admire, many of them Southern, whether that’s Affrilachian poets or the late Jake Adam York or our U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. Many of them are friends of mine, and we share that geographic impulse.

But I think geography can be overdetermined; it isn’t always destiny. At the same time that there is rootedness and depth, the South is shifting, changing, often faster than our conceptions of it. That’s always interesting, too. Now I’ve lived in Georgia all told longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. With my parents coming from the South, and all my life immersed in Southern foodways—Louisiana is serious about food, remember—it’s hard not to think of myself as Southern in much that way. We ate like southerners no matter where we lived, which has put me in good stead.

Maybe being Southern is not just where you were born, but where your people are buried? If so, all my family is buried here in one or two graveyards and there’s something powerful about that too.

SSSL: In addition to writing poetry, you also curate a collection, the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. How does your curatorial work influence your poetry?

Kevin Young: It does a lot. It influences my prose quite directly. In terms of poetry, it’s a way of connecting to these questions of history, or the status if the object, thinking about the book in its many forms. All of that can’t help but influence how I go about writing, or building, a book. At the same time, curating a nice relief from poetry making–it doesn’t have the same ambiguity. If something is great, it’s already great, and you don’t have to worry or wonder.

SSSL: Your most recent collection, Book of Hours, focuses on your experience as a father and the death of your own father. What does the passage of generations mean to you?

Kevin Young: For me, it’s a little like literature, although it’s completely different. Both generations and literature are about continuity and connection. But there’s almost more a surprising connection: the hope in the book is one of surprise and the unexpected after grief; it’s about the pleasures of being a father and the small moments of consolation after losing a father. I think those are the connections, which I don’t always think of as generational but of family and being. The book is about death, but also birth and the afterlife of grief, how you go on.

SSSL: Who are some southern poets we should be reading, teaching, and studying?

Kevin Young: Jericho Brown, if you don’t know his work. He’s from Louisiana, and we always tease each other that we’re related. He has a first book called Please, which is quite good, and he also has a new book called The New Testament that will be out in fall 2014. I’m thinking mostly of those with recent books: Jake Adam York (whose posthumous book Abide is coming out), Sean Hill, whose Dangerous Goods just dropped. Not a poet, but Jesmyn Ward’s work has that same intensity to me and should not be missed.

Interestingly, I was just an artist-in-residency in Florida with Mark Doty, a tremendous poet who won the National Book Award. We were talking on stage, and I hadn’t quite realized that he was originally from Tennessee. On stage, I asked him if he considered himself a southern writer. It was interesting to hear him talk about that, which I hadn’t thought of, but it makes total sense. There was a beautiful, complicated pastoral quality to his new work that strikes me as Southern. Maybe part of it is that thinking about writers who now live and work in the South, as well as writers who are from the South but dispersed in other ways, may will help us see the breadth—and depth—of the field.

EMERGING SCHOLARS ORGANIZATION

Stephanie Rountree, President of SSSL’s Emerging Scholars Organization, is a Ph.D. Student in American Literature and Feminist Theory at Georgia State University. Her work has been published in Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, and she is the co-author of “Writing through Culture” in GSU’s Guide to First-Year Writing, 2nd Ed (Fountainhead, 2013).

Scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed, I am struck by the slew of updates on dissertation defenses, manuscript uploads, and new positions. My Twitter feed is chock full of Instagram-filtered snapshots of newly-minted Ph.D.s in hooded regalia and front pages of new publications. Among the hubbub of Spring activities in academia, it seems timely that SSSL announces its new Emerging Scholars Organization as so many of our members are, well, emerging.

And as we emerge, the new ESO will work to support us along the way. The vision for the ESO is one grounded in networking, mentorship, and professionalization. Our inaugural membership has visions of job market seminars, digital writing workshops, online bibliographies organized by southern focus (Native South, Global South, etc.), social events to welcome and acclimate new SSSL members, formal opportunities to network with established scholars, a standing ESO panel at the biennial conference, and so much more. While these aspirations are certainly ambitious, I am confident that the leaders who have emerged (pun intended) to lead the ESO are up to the task.

It is an honor and a pleasure to announce the inaugural Executive Council to the SSSL’s Emerging Scholars Organization. In our designated MA-level council seat, Kelly Vines has been elected; she is currently completing her thesis at Georgia State University and will matriculate at Louisiana State University in the Fall. Next, the ESO membership has elected Zackary Vernon, a recent Ph.D. graduate of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Zack has several articles published in the Journal of Modern Literature, ISLE, North Carolina Literary Review, Appalachian Journal, South Carolina Review, and Fifty Years After Faulkner (UP of Mississippi), and he has recently announced his new position as visiting professor of contemporary American literature and film at Merrimack College. Matt Dischinger, a Ph.D. Candidate at Louisiana State University, has also been elected; Matt’s work has been published in the 2013 collection, Race and Displacement: Nation, Migration, and Identity in the Twenty-First Century (U of Alabama Press) with a forthcoming chapter in Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas (UP Mississippi), and his expected graduation date is Spring 2015. Likewise, Monica Miller, also a Ph.D Candidate at Louisiana State University, has been elected to the executive council; her work is forthcoming in the Flannery O’Connor Review, and she is expected to graduate in August 2014.

As you can see, we have a spectacular group of scholars at the helm of our ESO, and I have nothing but the highest aspirations for what we will accomplish together. The SSSL has long fostered a culture of collaboration and mentorship among its members, and we are delighted to continue this culture in the ESO’s vision, mission, and initiatives. But we cannot do it alone! If you are not already involved, we welcome all scholars from a broad range of career levels. This includes: graduate students, newly-minted Ph.D.s, independent scholars, adjunct/visiting/early assistant professors or lecturers, or any other member who considers his- or herself to be an “emerging scholar.” Additionally, we welcome established scholars who would like to serve as formal mentors to the ESO.

Whether you serve as a member or as a mentor, we welcome you as an integral part of the SSSL’s new Emerging Scholars Organization. Our first order of business is to establish a website to centralize all of the ESO’s communications, so be sure to check back on SSSL’s main website (southernlit.org) for an announcement over the summer. Until then, thanks to everyone who has played a role in getting the ESO off the ground, for I am proud to say that we are, officially, up and running!

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Ernest J. Gaines Society: The Ernest J. Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette has established the Ernest J. Gaines Society to promote research and scholarship on the work of Ernest J. Gaines. The society plans to organize panels on Gaines at future meetings of the ALA (beginning in 2015) and SSSL. For more information and the membership form, please go to the Gaines Center website <ernestgaines.louisiana.edu> or contact Marcia Gaudet <[email protected]>.

Call for submissions for the 2015 issue of the NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW (www.nclr.ecu.edu), featuring Global North Carolina Literature.

Now more than ever, North Carolina is finding its way into literature that stretches beyond the state’s borders. From those who’ve moved here from places and cultures around the globe, to those who’ve departed our state bound for distant destinations worldwide, how has “the writingest state” (as Doris Betts called North Carolina) influenced their writing? Is it our rich history, our storied heritage, our diverse culture, our singular environment? Is it our people? Or is it the barbecue that most influences those coming and going? As we pause to step back and examine North Carolina’s global influence, we invite submissions from writers and about literature that bear the imprint of our beloved Old North State.

For this section, we would be interested in articles on, interviews with, and creative nonfiction by …

·      writers who have a deep history in North Carolina but live and/or write books set elsewhere

·      “immigrant” writers—writers (of various ethnicities) from outside of North Carolina who have made North Carolina their home

·      non- North Carolina writers setting works here

Complete submissions are due by August 31, 2014. Early submissions and proposals are welcome. Queries and proposals for the special feature section may be emailed to the editor, Margaret Bauer ([email protected]). For formatting manuscripts and online submission instructions, please consult our website: www.nclr.ecu.edu/submissions.

Call for papers, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, special issue, “Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson for the 21st Century,” Guest Editors: Sandra Zagarell, Katherine Adams, Caroline Gebhard

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers solicits papers for a special issue devoted to writing by Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Best known today as the author of regionalist short fiction set in her native New Orleans, Dunbar-Nelson was also an essayist, poet, playwright, newspaper columnist and editor, diarist, anthologist, educator, and activist engaged in the suffrage movement and African American political and social advancement.

Neither Dunbar-Nelson’s oeuvre nor her life fits comfortably into the ways of thinking that have traditionally shaped Americanist, African Americanist, and feminist criticism. For example, while some of her short stories openly engage racial inequity, much of the New Orleans fiction seems to hew to an aesthetic that prizes polish over politics. It takes considerable knowledge of the city’s racialized cultural geography and history to recognize how artfully Dunbar-Nelson’s fiction unsettles presumptions about racial and sexual distinctions, religion, ethnicity, nation, class, and gender. Dunbar-Nelson’s own practices of identification were enormously complicated. She was a prominent black activist and public intellectual; she felt that as a light-skinned African American she suffered from reverse colorism; she was herself sometimes derisive about dark-skinned blacks. Her sexuality was fluid: she had sexual-romantic relationships with women as well as men, and her most enduring relationships were with her third husband, Robert J. Nelson, and a woman educator, Edwina B. Kruse.

Despite Akasha Gloria Hull’s pioneering recovery work and the publication of three volumes by the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Dunbar-Nelson’s writing still awaits the recognition it merits. This special issue sets out to revisit Dunbar-Nelson’s work in relation to recent and new areas of scholarly inquiry, including critical regionalisms; new southern studies; intersectional feminist criticism; black print culture and periodicals studies; the rethinking of periodization; and reconsiderations of relationships between genre and literary historiography, politics and aesthetics. Not only do such frameworks promise to bring Dunbar-Nelson’s writing and life more fully into view; the writing and the woman promise to help us complicate and advance these developing frameworks.

The guest editors invite submissions focused on any period or aspect of Dunbar-Nelson’s career, with a special interest in scholarship that looks beyond her New Orleans collections, Violets (1895) and The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899). Comparative analyses with contemporaneous writers are welcome.

Deadline: Completed papers must be submitted by 30 September 2014. Length limit: 10,000 words (including endnotes and list of works cited) using MLA format. Send electronic copies of papers to this special issue’s guest editors: Katherine Adams ([email protected]), Sandra Zagarell  ([email protected]) and Caroline Gebhard ([email protected]). Questions may be directed to any of the three.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Zack Vernon, Editorial Assistant for the SSSL Newsletter, recently received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Next year, he will be Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Merrimack College.

Journal Articles

American Literary History

  • Cobb, Jasmine Nichole. “Directed by Himself: Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave.” American Literary History 26.2 (2014): 339-46.
  • Dimock, Wai Chee. “Crowdsourcing History: Ishmael Reed, Tony Kushner, and Steven Spielberg Update the Civil War.” American Literary History 25.4 (2013): 896-914.
  • Douglas, Christopher. “The Poisonwood Bible‘s Multicultural Graft: American Literature during the Contemporary Christian Resurgence.” American Literary History 26.1 (2014): 132-53.
  • Ernest, John. “(Re)Mediated History: 12 Years a Slave.” American Literary History 26.2 (2014): 367-73.
  • Li, Stephanie. “12 Years a Slave as a Neo-Slave Narrative.” American Literary History 26.2 (2014): 326-31.
  • Peña, Elaine A. “More than a Dead American Hero: Washington, the Improved Order of Red Men, and the Limits of Civil Religion.” American Literary History 26.1 (2014): 61-82.
  • Smith, Valerie. “Black Life in the Balance: 12 Years a Slave.” American Literary History 26.2 (2014): 362-66.
  • Stauffer, John. “12 Years between Life and Death.” American Literary History 26.2 (2014): 317-25.
  • Taylor, Matthew A. “The Ends of History.” American Literary History 25.4 (2014): 944-57.
  • Thaggert, Miriam. “12 Years a Slave: Jasper’s Look.” American Literary History 26.2 (2014): 332-38.
  • Thompson, Mark Christian. “What Will Be African-American Literature?” American Literary History 25.4 (2014): 958-66.
  • Tillet, Salamishah.  “I Got No Comfort in This Life”: The Increasing Importance of Patsey in 12 Years a Slave.” American Literary History 26.2 (2014): 354-61.
  • Wilkens, Matthew. “The Geographic Imagination of Civil War-Era American Fiction.” American Literary History 25.4 (2014): 803-40.
  • Williams, Andreá N. “Sex, Marriage, and 12 Years a (Single) Slave.” American Literary History 26.2 (2014): 347-53.

American Literary Realism

  • Bufkin, Sydney. “Beyond “Bitter”: Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition” American Literary Realism 46.3 (Spring 2014): 230-50.
  • Davis, John H. “Mark Twain’s Arousal of Curiosity in ‘A Curious Experience.’” American Literary Realism 46.2 (Winter 2014): 176-86.

American Literature

  • Edmunds, Susan Louise. “‘Just Like Home’: Richard Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the New Deal.” American Literature 86.1 (2014): 61-86.
  • Gniadek, Melissa. “Seriality and Settlement: Southworth, Lippard, and the Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley.” American Literature 86.1 (2014): 31-59.
  • Lightweis-Goff, Jennie. “Peculiar and Characteristic”: New Orleans’s Exceptionalism from Olmsted to the Deluge. American Literature 86.1 (2014): 147-69.
  • Mielke, Laura L. “Edwin Forrest’s July 4th Oration and the Specters of Provocative Eloquence.” American Literature 86.1 (2014): 1-30.
  • Stuelke, Patricia. “Times When Greater Disciplines Are Born”: The Zora Neale Hurston Revival and the Neoliberal Transformation of the Caribbean.” American Literature 86.1 (2014): 117-45.

Callaloo

  • Barrio-Vilar, Laura. “All O’ We Is One”?: Migration, Citizenship, and Black Nativism in the Postcolonial Era.” Callaloo 37.1 (Winter 2014): 89-111.
  • Casteel, Sarah Phillips. “Port and Plantation Jews in Contemporary Slavery Fiction of the Americas.” Callaloo 37.1 (Winter 2014): 112-29.
  • Chetty, Raj G. “The Tragicomedy of Anticolonial Overcoming: Toussaint Louverture and The Black Jacobins on Stage.” Callaloo 37.1 (Winter 2014): 69-88.
  • Deshmukh, Madhuri H. “Claude McKay’s Road to Catholicism.” Callaloo 37.1 (Winter 2014): 148-68.
  • Ewing, Adam. “Lying Up a Nation: Zora Neale Hurston and the Local Uses of Diaspora.” Callaloo 37.1 (Winter 2014): 130-47.
  • Jackson, Shona N. “Risk, Blackness, and Postcolonial Studies: An Introduction.” Callaloo 37.1 (Winter 2014): 63-8.

Early American Literature

  • Dippold, Steffi. “The Wampanoag Word: John Eliot’s Indian Grammar, the Vernacular Rebellion, and the Elegancies of Native Speech.” Early American Literature 48. 3 (2013): 543-75.
  • Mattes, Mark Alan. “Penman’s Devil: The Chirographic and Typographic Urgency of Race in the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African.” Early American Literature 48. 3 (2013): 577-612.
  • Vogeley, Nancy. “A Mexican Drama of Late-Colonial Politics.” Early American Literature 48. 3 (2013): 613-40.

Edgar Allan Poe Review

  • Absalyamova, Elina. “Reflecting Poe’s Smile.” Edgar Allan Poe Review 15.1 (2013): 20-36.
  • Dern, John A. “A Sense of Stile Rhetoric in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Never Bet the Devil Your Head.’” Edgar Allan Poe Review 14.2 (2013): 163-77.
  • Eddings, Dennis W. “MAD About “The Raven.”  Edgar Allan Poe Review 14.2 (2013): 144-62.
  • McGann, Jerome J. “‘The Bells,’ Performance, and the Politics of Poetry.” Edgar Allan Poe Review 15.1 (2013): 47-58.
  • Rachman, Stephen. “Poe, the Arabesque, and Cosmology.” Edgar Allan Poe Review 14.2 (2013): 1-19.
  • Studniarz, Sławomir. “Poetry as “An Inferior or Less Apable Music” Sound and Meaning in ‘The Conqueror Worm’ and ‘To One in Paradise.’”  Edgar Allan Poe Review 15.1 (2013): 59-81.
  • Tarr, Clayton Carlyle. “Edgar Allan Poe, Maria Edgeworth, and the Study of Chirography.” Edgar Allan Poe Review 14.2 (2013): 178-98.
  • Urakova, Alexandra. “Poe, Fashion, and Godey’s Lady’s Book.” Edgar Allan Poe Review 15.1 (2013): 37-46.
  • Wall, Brian. “Narrative Purpose and Legal Logic in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’” Edgar Allan Poe Review 14.2 (2013): 129-43.

Flannery O’Connor Review

  • Donahoo, Robert. “Recasting the Monuments: O’Connor and Histories of the South.” Flannery O’Connor Review 11 (2013): 1-21.
  • Emerick, Ronald.  “The Woods Are Full of Imitators:  The Legacy of Flannery O’Connor.”  Flannery O’Connor Review 11 (2013):  113-122.
  • Gordon, Sarah. “Surface Matters in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction.” Flannery O’Connor Review 11 (2013): 22-30.
  • King, David A. “Hitched: The Similar Legacies of Flannery O’Connor and Alfred Hitchcock.” Flannery O’Connor Review 11 (2013): 50-69.
  • Lipovski-Helal, Kathleen. “Flannery O’Connor’s Encounter with Mary Ann Long.” Flannery O’Connor Review 11 (2013):  38-49.
  • Odom, Michael. “How to Win Friends and Convert People: Onnie Jay Holy and the Sales Culture of American Evangelicalism.” Flannery O’Connor Review 11 (2013): 123-35.
  • Robinson, Karen. “O’Connor Onstage: Embodiment and Polyphonic Narration.” Flannery O’Connor Review 11 (2013): 86-98.
  • Srigley, Susan. “Flannery O’Connor in the Public Square: Karin Coonrod’s Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Flannery O’Connor Review 11 (2013): 99-112.
  • Wehner, David Z. “‘To Hell with It’: Flannery O’Connor, The Exorcist, and the Literal/Figurative Tension in Modernity.” Flannery O’Connor Review 11 (2013): 70-85.

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

  • Christensen, Nels Anchor. “Facing the Weather in James Galvin’s The Meadow and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21. 1 (Winter 2014): 192-204.

James Dickey Review

  • Hoeben, Ric. “Beyond Basic Biophilia: Engaging College Students with the Real, Real World.” James Dickey Review 30.2 (Spring-Summer 2014).
  • Madden, Ed. “James Dickey: In Touch With Darkness.” James Dickey Review 30.2 (Spring-Summer 2014).
  • Norman, Benjamin. “Chrysopoeia: metaphysical reflections on transformation in James Dickey’s ‘The Owl King.’” James Dickey Review 30.2 (Spring-Summer 2014).

Journal of American Studies

  • Follini, Tamari L. “Speaking Monuments: Henry James, Walt Whitman, and the Civil War Statues of Augustus Saint-Gaudens.” Journal of American Studies 48.1 (2014): 25-49.
  • Knight, Henry. “‘Savages of Southern Sunshine’: Racial Realignment of the Seminoles in the Selling of Jim Crow Florida.” Journal of American Studies 48.1 (2014): 251-73.
  • Hickman, Timothy A. “A Chicago Architect in King Arthur’s Court: Mark Twain, Daniel Burnham and the Imperialism of Gilded Age Modernity.” Journal of American Studies 48.1 (2014): 99-126.
  • Sandy, Laura. “Divided Loyalties in a ‘Predatory War’: Plantation Overseers and Slavery during the American Revolution.” Journal of American Studies 48.2 (2014): 357-92.
  • Terry, Jennifer. “‘Breathing the Air of a World So New’: Rewriting the Landscape of America in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.” Journal of American Studies 48.1 (2014): 127-145.

J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

  • Jones, Paul Christian. “‘Her Little Maid Mandy’: The Abolitionist Slave Owner and the Rhetoric of Affection in the Life and Early Fiction of E. D. E. N. Southworth,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 2.1 (Spring 2014): 53-82.
  • Sugden, Edward. “Simultaneity- across- Borders: Richard Henry Dana Jr., Alexander von Humboldt, Edgar Allan Poe.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 2.1 (Spring 2014): 83-106.

MELUS

  • Barlow, Daniel. “Literary Ethnomusicology and the Soundscape of Jean Toomer’s Cane.” MELUS 39.1 (Spring 2014): 192-211.
  • Coulombe, Joseph L. “The Efficacy of Humor in Sherman Alexie’s Flight: Violence, Vulnerability, and the Post-9/11 World.” MELUS 39.1 (Spring 2014): 130-48.
  • Dykema, Amanda. “Embodied Knowledges: Synesthesia and the Archive in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth.” MELUS 39.1 (Spring 2014): 1-6-29.
  • Godfrey, Mollie. “Rewriting White, Rewriting Black: Authentic Humanity and Authentic Blackness in Nella Larsen’s ‘Sanctuary.’” MELUS 38.4 (2013): 122-45.
  • Henderson, Christina. “Sympathetic Violence: Maria Stewart’s Antebellum Vision of African American Resistance.” MELUS 38.4 (2013): 52-75.
  • Huh, Jinny. “Detecting Winnifred Eaton.” MELUS 39.1 (Spring 2014): 82-105.
  • Lawson, Benjamin S. “Witnessing Charles Chesnutt: The Contexts of ‘The Dumb Witness.’” MELUS 38.4 (2013): 103-21.
  • Morgenstern, Naomi. “Maternal Love/Maternal Violence: Inventing Ethics in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.” MELUS 39.1 (Spring 2014): 7-29.
  • Pattison, Dale. “Sites of Resistance: The Subversive Spaces of Their Eyes Were Watching God.” MELUS 38.4 (2013): 9-31.
  • Sibara, Jennifer Barager. “Disease, Disability, and the Alien Body in the Literature of Sui Sin Far.” MELUS 39.1 (Spring 2014): 56-81.
  • Wyatt, Jean. “The Economic Grotesque and the Critique of Capitalism in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby.” MELUS 39.1 (Spring 2014): 30-55.

Mississippi Quarterly

  • Clough, Edward. “Violence and the hearth: lynching and resistance in Go Down, Moses.” Mississippi Quarterly. 65.3 (Summer 2012).
  • Elliott, Jack D. “Looking for Callie Barr.” Mississippi Quarterly. 65.3 (Summer 2012).
  • Kenley, Nicole. “The Southern hard(ly) boiled: Knight’s Gambit, The Big Sleep, and Faulkner’s construction of the popular masculine subject.” Mississippi Quarterly. 65.3 (Summer 2012).
  • Materassi, Mario. “Madame Aubert-Rocque and Miss Emily Grierson: something in common.” Mississippi Quarterly. 65.3 (Summer 2012).
  • Sensibar, Judith L. “Solicited response to ‘Looking for Callie Barr’ by Jack D. Elliott.” Mississippi Quarterly. 65.3 (Summer 2012).
  • Wainwright, Michael. “The Morphosis of Faulkner’s Chess.” Mississippi Quarterly. 65.3 (Summer 2012).

MFS: Modern Fiction Studies

  • Arant, Alison. “Mary, Full of Corruption: Disease in Richard Wright’s A Father’s Law.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 59.4 (Winter 2013): 742-57.
  • Lackey, Michael. “Nazi Children, Christian Anti-Semitism, and the New Atheist in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 60.1 (Spring 2014): 138-64.
  • Watson, Jay. “Dangerous Return: The Narratives of Jurisgenesis in Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 60.1 (Spring 2014): 108-37.

Nineteenth-Century Literature

  • Hickman, Jared. “Douglass Unbound.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 68.3 (2013): 323-62.
  • Hutchins, Zachary McLeod. “Rejecting the Root: The Liberating, Anti-Christ Theology of Douglass’s Narrative.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 68.3 (2013): 292-322.
  • Yarborough, Richard. “Introduction: Frederick Douglass and Theology.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 68.3 (2013):  287-91.

Southern Cultures

  • Donaldson, Susan V. “‘A Stake in the Story”: Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby, and the Politics of Southern Storytelling.” Southern Cultures 20.1 (Spring 2014): 38-50.
  • Graham, Allison. “‘We Ain’t Doin’ Civil Rights’: The Life and Times of a Genre, as Told in The Help.” Southern Cultures 20.1 (Spring 2014): 51-64.
  • Jones, Suzanne W. “The Divided Reception of The Help.” Southern Cultures 20.1 (Spring 2014): 7-25.
  • McHaney, Pearl. “Kathryn Stockett’s Postmodern First Novel.” Southern Cultures 20.1 (Spring 2014): 77-92.
  • Smith, Valerie. “Black Women’s Memories and The Help.” Southern Cultures 20.1 (Spring 2014): 26-37.
  • Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly. “Every Child Left Behind: The Many Invisible Children in The Help.” Southern Cultures 20.1 (Spring 2014): 65-76.

Southern Literary Journal

  • Cook, Sylvia J. “Reading Clothes: Literary Dress in William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell.” Southern Literary Journal 46.1 (Fall 2013): 1-18.
  • Bain, Grant. “Boxing Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner, Race, and Popular Front Boxing Narratives.” Southern Literary Journal 46.1 (Fall 2013): 19-35.
  • McDonald, Hal. “Et Ego in Atlantis: A Possible Source for Quentin Compson’s Suicide.” Southern Literary Journal 46.1 (Fall 2013): 36-47.
  • Todd, Jason S. “A Good Carpenter: Cash Bundren’s Quest for Balance and Authority.” Southern Literary Journal 46.1 (Fall 2013): 48-60.
  • Luter, Matthew. “The Multiply Framed Narratives of Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby.” Southern Literary Journal 46.1 (Fall 2013): 61-77.
  • Tunc, Tanfer Emin. “Caroline Gordon’s Ghosts: The Women on the Porch as Southern Gothic Literature.” Southern Literary Journal 46.1 (Fall 2013): 78-95.
  • Odom, Michael. “Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain: Descent and Vision in the Southern Memoir.” Southern Literary Journal 46.1 (Fall 2013): 96-109.
  • Nichols, Garrett. “‘Clo’es could do de like o’ dat’: Race, Place, and Power in Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson.” Southern Literary Journal 46.1 (Fall 2013): 110-26.

Southern Spaces

  • Hagood, Taylor. “The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project.” Southern Spaces 22 January 2014.
  • Pecchenino, Daniel. “‘Gaps in People’s Lacks’: James Franco’s As I Lay Dying.” Southern Spaces 19 December 2013.
  • Pecchenino, Daniel. “A Real American Horror Story: On Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave.” Southern Spaces 19 February 2014.

Southern Quarterly

  • Bush, Harold K. “Continuing Bonds and Emmett Till’s Mother.” Southern Quarterly 50.3 (Spring 2013): 9-27.
  • Guice, John D. W. “A History of the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration: A Personal View.” Southern Quarterly 51.1/2 (Fall 2013/Winter 2014): 11-25.
  • Henninger, Katherine R. “What Remains: Race, Nation, and the Adult Child in the Poetry of Natasha Trethewey.” Southern Quarterly 50.4 (Summer 2013): 55-74.
  • Kurowska, Joanna. “Colonialism in the French Quarter: Tennessee Williams and Joseph Conrad.” Southern Quarterly 50.2 (Winter 2013): 109-22.
  • Mansell, Jefferson. “‘Now Occupied for Public Use’: The Houses of Natchez behind Enemy Lines.” Southern Quarterly 51.1/2 (Fall 2013/Winter 2014): 73-92.
  • McHaney, Pearl Amelia. “Natasha Trethewey’s Triptych: The Bodies of History in Bellocq’s Ophelia, Native Guard, and Thrall.” Southern Quarterly 50.4 (Summer 2013): 153-72.
  • Millichap, Joseph. “‘Love and Knowledge’: Daughters and Fathers in Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall.” Southern Quarterly 50.4 (Summer 2013): 189-207.
  • Pereira, Marlin. “Re-reading Trethewey through Mixed Race Studies.” Southern Quarterly 50.4 (Summer 2013): 123-52.
  • Raeburn, Bruce Boyd. “‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead’: Louis Armstrong’s Smack Down with White Authority and his First Films, 1930-1932.” Southern Quarterly 51.1/2 (Fall 2013/Winter 2014): 58-72.
  • Richardson, Riché. “Framing Rosa Parks in Reel Time.” Southern Quarterly 50.3 (Spring 2013): 54-65.
  • Turner, Beth. “Colorism in Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman: The Effect of Intraracial Racism on Black Identity and the Concept of Black Community.” Southern Quarterly 50.3 (Spring 2013): 32-53.
  • Turner, Daniel Cross. “Lyric Dissections: Rendering Blood Memory in Natasha Trethewey’s and Yusef Komunyakaa’s Poetry of the Black Diaspora.” Southern Quarterly 50.4 (Summer 2013): 99-122.
  • Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly. “‘Your Eyes Returning my Own Gaze’: Distortion and Photography as Meta-Narrative in Trethewey’s Poetry.” Southern Quarterly 50.4 (Summer 2013): 173-88.
  • Warren, Nagueyalti. “History, Memory, and Nostalgia in the Works of Natasha Trethewey.” Southern Quarterly 50.4 (Summer 2013): 75-98.
  • Watson, Jay. “William Faulkner’s Civil Wars.” Southern Quarterly 51.1/2 (Fall 2013/Winter 2014): 40-57.
  • White, Elizabeth Eudora. “Observations: Eudora Welty at Home in the World.” Southern Quarterly 51.1/2 (Fall 2013/Winter 2014): 106-16.
  • Wilson, Charles Reagan. “Mississippi Rebels: Elvis Presley, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the South’s Culture of Religious Music.” Southern Quarterly 50.2 (Winter 2013): 9-30.
  • Winter, William F. “The Evolution of Politics in the Deep South.” Southern Quarterly 51.1/2 (Fall 2013/Winter 2014): 93-105.
  • Wylie Hall, Joan. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: ‘The Necessary Utterance’–Natasha Trethewey’s Southern Poetics.” Southern Quarterly 50.4 (Summer 2013): 7-12.

Studies in American Culture

  • Graves, Brian. “A Glimpse Into the Past”: Communication, Cultural Tourism, and the Political Economy of Modern Gullah Preservation.” Studies in American Culture 36.1 (2013).

Studies in the Novel

  • Ardoin, Paul. “Space, Aesthetic Power, and True Falsity in The Known World.” Studies in the Novel 45.4 (2014): 638-654.
  • Vernon, Zackary. ““Being Myriad, One”: Melville and the Ecological Sublime in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses.” Studies in the Novel 46.1 (2014): 63-82.

Twentieth-Century Literature

  • Furr, Derek. “Re-Sounding Folk Voice, Remaking the Ballad: Alan Lomax, Margaret Walker, and the New Criticism.” Twentieth-Century Literature 59.2 (Summer 2013): 232-59.

Recent Books

Cambridge University Press

  • Cima, Gay Gibson. Performing Anti-Slavery: Activist Women on Antebellum Stages. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014.
  • Graham, Maryemma. A History of the African American Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014.
  • Hill, Lena. Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014.
  • Mastroianni, Dominic. Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014.
  • Roth, Sarah N. Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014.

Duke University Press

  • Thomas, Lynnell. Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory. Durham: Duke UP, 2014.

Fordham University Press

  • Rios, Christopher M. After the Monkey Trial: Evangelical Scientists and a New Creationism. Bronx, NY: Fordham UP, 2014.

Louisiana State University Press

  • Barr, John McKee. Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2014.
  • Camanella, Richard. Bourbon Street: A History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2014.
  • Jones, Evan C. and Wiley Sword, eds. Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862-1863. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2014.
  • Theriot, Jason P. American Energy, Imperiled Coast: Oil and Gas Development in Louisiana’s Wetlands. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2014.
  • White, Jonathan W. Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2014.

Oxford University Press

  • Chiles, Katy. Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America. New York: Oxford UP, 2014.
  • Cox, James H. and Daniel Heath, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2014.
  • Ernest, John, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 2014.
  • Frank, Adam. Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol. New York: Oxford UP, 2014.
  • Fuller, Randall. From Battlefields Rising: How The Civil War Transformed American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2014.
  • LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. New York: Oxford UP, 2014.
  • Roynon, Tessa. Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition: Transforming American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2014.
  • Terry, Jennifer. Shuttles in the Rocking Loom: Mapping the Black Diaspora in African American and Caribbean Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 2014.

Salem Press

  • Evans, Robert C. ed. Critical Insights: The Awakening. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2013.

University Press of Florida

  • Alexander, Simone A. James. African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2014.
  • Feldman, Glenn, ed. Nation within a Nation: The American South and the Federal Government. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2014.
  • Shafer, Daniel L. Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World: Slave Trader, Plantation Owner, Emancipator. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2014.
  • Swindall, Lindsay R. The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937-1955. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2014.

University of Georgia Press

  • Blanck, Emily. Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2014.
  • Drake, Brian Allen, ed. The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2014.
  • Leak, Jeffrey B. Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2014.
  • Morris, Tiyi M. Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2014.
  • Pelletier, Kevin. Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in U.S. Antebellum Literature. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2014.
  • Pugh, Tison. Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2014.
  • Silkey, Sarah L. Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2014.

University Press of Mississippi

  • Davis, David A. and Tara Powell, eds. Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014.
  • Day, John Kyle. The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014.
  • Maus, Derek C., and James J. Donahue, eds. Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014.
  • Miller, Andrea, Shearon Roberts, and Victoria LaPoe. Oil and Water: Media Lessons from Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014.
  • Seward, Adrienne Lanier, and Justine Talley, eds. Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014.
  • Smith, Fred C. Trouble in Goshen: Plain Folk, Roosevelt, Jesus, and Marx in the Great Depression South. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014.
  • Trefzer, Annette, and Ann J. Abadie, eds. Faulkner and Mystery. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014.

University of North Carolina Press

  • Cushman, Stephen. Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014.
  • Ferris, Marcie Cohen. The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014.
  • Maxwell, Angie. The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014.
  • Prince, K. Stephen. Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014.
  • Ritchie, Fiona, and Doug Orr. Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014.
  • Roberts, Blain. Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014.
  • Robinson, Zandria F. This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014.
  • Rubin, Anne Sarah. Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014.
  • Summers, Mark Wahlgren. The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014.
  • Weaver, Jace. The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014.
  • Williams, Timothy J. Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014.

University of South Carolina Press

  • Fahy, Thomas. Understanding Truman Capote. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2014.
  • Gleeson, David T., and Simon Lewis. The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2014.

University of Tennessee Press

  • Ferrence, Matthew J. All-American Redneck: Variations on an Icon, from James Fenimore Cooper to the Dixie Chicks. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2014.
  • Harvey, Bruce G. World’s Fairs in a Southern Accent: Atlanta, Nashville, and Charleston, 1895–1902. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2014.
  • Talley, Sharon. Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War: Trauma and Collective Memory in the American Literary Tradition since 1861. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2014.

University of Virginia Press

  • Edelstein, Sari. Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women’s Writing. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014.
  • Hamilton, Geoff. The Life and Undeath of Autonomy in American Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014.
  • Hardison, Ayesha K. Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014.
  • Kaminski, John P. The Great Virginia Triumvirate: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison in the Eyes of Their Contemporaries. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014.
  • Morris, Susana M. Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014.
  • Woodward, Colin Edward. Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014.