The Southern Way Of Life

Download or read book The Southern Way of Life written by Charles Reagan Wilson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life—a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the American South in national and global contexts, celebrated historian Charles Reagan Wilson assesses how diverse communities of southerners have sought to define the region's identity. Surveying three centuries of southern regional consciousness across many genres, disciplines, and cultural strains, Wilson considers and challenges prior presentations of the region, advancing a vision of southern culture that has always been plural, dynamic, and complicated by race and class. Structured in three parts, The Southern Way of Life takes readers on a journey from the colonial era to the present, from when complex ideas of "southern civilization" rooted in slaveholding and agrarianism dominated to the twenty-first-century rise of a modern, multicultural "southern living." As Wilson shows, there is no singular or essential South but rather a rich tapestry woven with contestations, contingencies, and change.

Download or read book Southern Life, Northern City written by Jennifer A. Lemak and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2008-10-02 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspirational story of an African American community that migrated from the Deep South to Albany, New York, in the 1930s.

Download or read book The Curious Thing: Poems written by Sandra Lim and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this gorgeous third collection, Sandra Lim investigates desire, sexuality, and dream with sinewy intelligence and a startling freshness. Truthful, sensuous, and intellectually relentless, the poems in The Curious Thing are compelling meditations on love, art making, solitude, female fate, and both the mundane and serious principles of life. Sandra Lim’s poetry displays stinging wit and a tough-minded approach to her own experiences: She speaks with Jean Rhys about beauty, encounters the dark loneliness that can exist inside a relationship, and discovers a coiled anger on a hot summer day. An extended poem sequence slyly revolves the meanings of finding oneself astray in midlife. A steely strength courses through the volume’s myriad discoveries—Lim’s lucidity and tenderness form a striking complement to her remarkable metaphors and the emotional clamor of her material. Animated by a sense of reckoning and a piercing inwardness, these anti-sentimental poems nevertheless celebrate the passionate and empathetic subjective life.

Download or read book Away Down South written by James C. Cobb and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern identity, served in an engaging blend of history, literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book, written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America. As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War, defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated the Cavalier myth into the cult of the "Lost Cause," which supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I, white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other key figures of "Southern Renaissance" as well as their African American counterparts in the "Harlem Renaissance"--Cobb is the first to show the strong links between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The Southern self-image underwent another sea change in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white supremacy shook the old definition of the "Southern way of life"--but at the same time, African Americans began to examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is everywhere, has the New South become the No South? Here then is a major work by one of America's finest Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the South means to southerners and to America as well.

Download or read book The Southern Tradition at Bay written by Richard M. Weaver and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Richard M. Weaver is best known for the classic Ideas Have Consequences, the foundation of his career was this study of his native South. Calling the Southern tradition "the last non-materialist civilization in the Western world," he traced its roots to feudalism, chivalry, religiosity, and aristocratic conventions. The Old South, he concluded, "may indeed be a hall hung with splendid tapestries in which no one would care to live; but from them we can learn something of how to live." Weaver’s exploration of the ideals and ideas of the Southern tradition as expressed in the military histories, autobiographies, diaries, and novels of the era following the Civil War—especially those written by the men and women on the losing side—is offered to a new generation of readers for whom that tradition has fallen into disrepute and who can scarcely imagine a life rooted in nature, the soil, and a powerful sense of honor. The Southern Tradition at Bay is, as Jeffrey Hart noted, the work of a man who admired what "is admirable indeed, and that is the foundation of wisdom and indeed sanity."

Download or read book The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Religion written by Charles Reagan Wilson and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 1: Religion

Download or read book The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture written by Charles Reagan Wilson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture addresses the cultural, social, and intellectual terrain of myth, manners, and historical memory in the American South. Evaluating how a distinct southern identity has been created, recreated, and performed through memories that blur the line between fact and fiction, this volume paints a broad, multihued picture of the region seen through the lenses of belief and cultural practice. The 95 entries here represent a substantial revision and expansion of the material on historical memory and manners in the original edition. They address such matters as myths and memories surrounding the Old South and the Civil War; stereotypes and traditions related to the body, sexuality, gender, and family (such as debutante balls and beauty pageants); institutions and places associated with historical memory (such as cemeteries, monuments, and museums); and specific subjects and objects of myths, including the Confederate flag and Graceland. Together, they offer a compelling portrait of the "southern way of life" as it has been imagined, lived, and contested.