|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
Historians and literary critics address contemporary Southern
history and its expression in fiction, the first group tending to
consider the origin of the present ideas of Southern identity and
the latter to speculate about its present and future. They
primarily ponder whether modernization has erased inherited
Southern values, and find that the ideological self-identification
there has a powerful potential for shaping national attitudes.
Fourteen Southern storytellers reveal their influences, methods and
daily routines, and struggles with the writing process Jan Nordby
Gretlund has been studying the literature of the American South for
some fifty years, and his outsider's perspective as a European
scholar has made him an intellectually acute witness of both the
literature and its creators. Whether it is their language and
reflexive storytelling or the craft and techniques by which writers
transform life and experience into art that fascinates Gretlund,
elements of this fiction led to his interviews with the fourteen
storytellers featured in Southern Writers Bear Witness. Gretlund
believes a good interview will always reveal something about a
writer's life and character, details that can inform a reading of
that author's fiction. The interviewer's task, according to
Gretlund, is to supply the reader with some of the sources and
experiences that inspired and shaped the fiction. Through his
conversations Gretlund also occasionally elicits the subjects'
reflections on other writers and their work to discover
affiliations, lines of influence, and divergences, and he also
emphasizes the enduring power of their work. His interviews with
Eudora Welty and Pam Durban uncover strong family and community
experiences found at the core of their fiction. Gretlund also turns
conversations to the craft of writing, writers' daily routines, and
specific problems encountered in their work, such as Clyde
Edgerton's struggle with point of view. In other exchanges he
investigates distinctive elements of a writer's work, such as
violence in Barry Hannah's fiction and religious faith in Walker
Percy's. Still other conversations, such as one with Josephine
Humphreys, touch on the pressures and opportunities of publishing
and its influence on the writer's work. Taken together, these
authors' insights on life in the South provide a fascinating window
into the creative process of storytelling as well as into the human
experiences that fuel it. A foreword by Daniel Cross Turner, author
of Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South
and coeditor of Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern
Literature and Culture and Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry, is also
included.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.