New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Eudora Welty ◽  
Chester Himes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Golden Apples ◽  
Haunted Houses

Responding to work begun in the 2013 collection Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race that mined and deciphered the complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South, the thirteen diverse voices of New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race deepen, reflect on, and respond to those seminal discussions. These essays freshly consider such topics as Welty’s treatment of African-American signifying in her short stories, and her attention to public street performances interacting with Jim Crow rules in her unpublished photographs. They consider her strategic adaptations of Gothic plots, black pastoral, civil war stories, haunted houses, and film noir. They frame Welty’s work with such subjects as Bob Dylan’s songwriting, the idea and history of the orphan in American, and standup comedy. They compare her handling of whiteness and race to that of other contemporary authors such as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, and Alice Walker. Additionally, several discussions bring her master-work The Golden Apples and her novel Losing Battles, under-represented in the earlier conversation, into new focus. The collection as a whole will help us to understand more clearly Welty’s artistic commentary on her time and place as well as the way her vision developed in a timespan moving America towards increased social awareness. Moreover, as a group, these essays provide insight into Welty as an innovative craftswoman and modernist technician, successfully altering literary form with her frequent pointed makeovers of familiar story patterns, plots, and genres. Together they show her as a remarkable writer idiosyncratically engaging and confidently altering literary history.

The Diaristic Form and Subjectivity under Khrushchev

Slavic Review ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 805-827 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anatoly Pinsky
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Soviet History ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Empirical Investigations

At the start of the post-Stalin period, writers and literary critics began to embrace the diaristic form as never before in Soviet history. In this article, I explore the gravitation toward this and other short and documentary genres. I foreground the subject of literary form, which has, I maintain, for too long remained in the background of scholarship on Soviet literature. The rise of a new privileged form was related dialogically to the emergence of a new normative subjectivity–one that called on citizens to engage in meticulous empirical investigations of Soviet life and to arrive at and advance their own critical conclusions about Soviet reality. In advancing these arguments, I revise the interpretations of Soviet literary history that have highlighted the significance of the novel, contributing to a growing body of scholarship on the history of Soviet subjectivity.

Publishing Africa in French

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Bush
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Global Dynamics ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
History Of ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
Presence Africaine

Publishing Africa in French provides a critical analysis of the global dynamics and cultural and publishing history of French and African literature. It focuses on French readership and the French literary-political sphere, and engages with issues of authorial authenticity, literary value, and author autonomy. The study is built on careful documentations of the pre- and post-publication process, and explores the relentless interweaving of ideas expressed in literary form, their institutional contexts and underlying human relationships, and asks: Who writes about Africa and who is Africa written for? The book is split into two sections, ‘Institutions’ and ‘Mediations’. The first part of the book, ‘Institutions’, situates three institutions of particular significance, the publishing houses of Le Seuil and Présence Africaine, and the Association nationale des écrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer. ‘Mediations’, the second section of the book, concludes with a consideration on how institutional structures work into or against the literary texture of selected publications, and examines readers’ reports and editorial revision; the use of pseudonyms; the development of named collections and the process of literary translation from English. Publishing Africa in French aims to bring book-historical principles to bear on a decisive period in French literary history and foregrounds the influencing factors on literary expression and its material impressions in the period of decolonization.

The Last Stage of the Literary History of the Book of Jeremiah

2021 ◽  
pp. 128-144
Author(s):  
Emanuel Tov
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Masoretic Text ◽  
History Of ◽  
Last Stage ◽  
Book Of Jeremiah ◽  
The Many

Presumably the book of Jeremiah underwent several editorial stages for which there is no evidence in the textual witnesses. At the same time, the last stage of the literary growth of that book is reflected in the elements that the Masoretic Text (MT) has in excess of the LXX and the Qumran scrolls 4QJerb,d. These differences are not scribal, but editorial, so that the latter have been named “edition I” and MT “edition II,” with the understanding that edition II was based on a literary form like edition I. This chapter describes the many views that have been expressed in the post-Qumran era on the content, tendencies, and dating of these two editions. It points out that the assumption of “layers” may be more appropriate than “editions.” In the wake of the research of Bogaert, this paper adds an excursus on the apocryphal book of Baruch that was surprisingly appended to the short, not the long, text of Jeremiah. Presumably, when edition I was expanded with Baruch, edition II was already in existence, but maybe at a different place or in a different environment. In any event, we do not know why Baruch was appended to the short and not the long edition.

On Essays

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
History And Criticism ◽  
Pedagogical Tool ◽  
History Of

What is an essay, and how did the essay emerge as a literary form? What are the continuities and surprising emergences across its history, from Montaigne’s 1580 Essais to the present? This volume assembles seventeen essays which address patterns and oddities in the history of the genre, paying attention both to the transformed legacies of the earliest essayists across the centuries, and to the form’s contemporary vibrancy. Contributors, both scholars and essayists, draw out paradoxes of what is considered the fourth genre, often overshadowed in literary history and criticism by fiction, poetry, and drama. The essay is at once a pedagogical tool, and a refusal of the technical languages of universities and professions; politically engaged but retired and independent; erudite and anti-pedantic; occasional and enduring; intimate and oratorical; allusive and idiosyncratic. The volume shows the essay as an ambassador between philosophy and public life, learnedness and experience. Since it is a form of writing against which academic work has defined itself, there has been surprisingly little scholarship on the history of the essay. On Essays addresses this dearth, not as a history or companion, but through a series of studies of major themes across the history of the genre.

Migration and Modernities

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Geographic Boundaries ◽  
The Us ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Migration and Modernities recovers a comparative literary history of migration by bringing together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the uneven emergence of modernity. The collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrating how mobility unsettles the geographic boundaries, temporal periodization, and racial categories we often use to organize literary and historical study. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. In exploring these spaces, Migration and Modernities also investigates the origins of current debates about belonging, rights, and citizenship. Its chapters traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined — of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.

Literature published in BAMlag’s main newspaper Stroitel BAMa

2019 ◽  
pp. 138-157
Author(s):  
T. E. Smykovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Lyrical Poetry ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
History Of ◽  
Labour Camp

T. Smykovskaya writes about a unique episode of Russian literary history: the development of so-called ‘labour-camp literature’, more specifically, lyrical poetry, published in the camps’ newspapers. The article focuses on BAMlag’s principal paper Stroitel BAMa, which saw publications of works by A. Alving, P. Florensky, A. Tsvetaeva, and other detainees. In her examination of the material, which so far has provoked little to no scholarly interest, the author highlights the key themes, images and subjects of labour-camp literature. Essentially, the article attempts to focus on the yet unknown history of the newspaper Stroitel BAMa, the main printed medium of BAMlag, as well as to describe the paper’s artistic and journalistic paradigm, which defined the literary activities of Svobodlag for a decade. Therefore, the article covers the newspaper’s history from the 1933 competition for its name until the emergence of the poetry section in the mid-1930s; from the Stakhanov theme, omnipresent in ‘free’ and labour-camp poetry alike in 1936, until eulogy of the Soviet leaders in pre-war years.

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