Jaime Harker
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604735604
- eISBN:
- 9781621033318
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604735604.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines whether there has ever been a lesbian William Faulkner by analyzing his novel Absalom, Absalom!, and by highlighting textual similarities between it and Southern lesbian ...
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This chapter examines whether there has ever been a lesbian William Faulkner by analyzing his novel Absalom, Absalom!, and by highlighting textual similarities between it and Southern lesbian literature. It argues that the novel is a “foremother” to contemporary lesbian writing in the South and places Faulkner into a trajectory of lesbian writing beginning with Florence King’s Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. The chapter also considers how characterization and space are mapped out in Absalom, Absalom! to correspond with novels that articulate lesbian desire such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. Drawing on scholarship by Frann Michel, who first posited “William Faulkner as a Lesbian Author” in 1989, it looks at the transformation of Supten’s Hundred into Judith’s Hundred, a “queer contact zone,” one both within and outside of Southern patriarchal structures.Less
This chapter examines whether there has ever been a lesbian William Faulkner by analyzing his novel Absalom, Absalom!, and by highlighting textual similarities between it and Southern lesbian literature. It argues that the novel is a “foremother” to contemporary lesbian writing in the South and places Faulkner into a trajectory of lesbian writing beginning with Florence King’s Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. The chapter also considers how characterization and space are mapped out in Absalom, Absalom! to correspond with novels that articulate lesbian desire such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. Drawing on scholarship by Frann Michel, who first posited “William Faulkner as a Lesbian Author” in 1989, it looks at the transformation of Supten’s Hundred into Judith’s Hundred, a “queer contact zone,” one both within and outside of Southern patriarchal structures.
Elizabeth Anne Payne (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617031731
- eISBN:
- 9781617031748
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617031731.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Anne Firor Scott’s The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 stirred a keen interest among historians in both the approach and message of her book. Using women’s diaries, letters, and ...
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Anne Firor Scott’s The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 stirred a keen interest among historians in both the approach and message of her book. Using women’s diaries, letters, and other personal documents, Scott brought to life southern women as wives and mothers, as members of their communities and churches, and as sometimes sassy but rarely passive agents. She brilliantly demonstrated that the familiar dichotomies of the personal versus the public, the private versus the civic, which had dominated traditional scholarship about men, could not be made to fit women’s lives. In doing so, Scott helped to open up vast terrains of women’s experiences for historical scholarship. This book, based on papers presented at the University of Mississippi’s annual Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History, brings together chapters by scholars at the forefront of contemporary scholarship on American women’s history. Each regards The Southern Lady as having shaped her historical perspective and inspired her choice of topics in important ways. These chapters demonstrate that the power of imagination and scholarly courage manifested in Scott’s and other early American women historians’ work has blossomed into a gracious plentitude.Less
Anne Firor Scott’s The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 stirred a keen interest among historians in both the approach and message of her book. Using women’s diaries, letters, and other personal documents, Scott brought to life southern women as wives and mothers, as members of their communities and churches, and as sometimes sassy but rarely passive agents. She brilliantly demonstrated that the familiar dichotomies of the personal versus the public, the private versus the civic, which had dominated traditional scholarship about men, could not be made to fit women’s lives. In doing so, Scott helped to open up vast terrains of women’s experiences for historical scholarship. This book, based on papers presented at the University of Mississippi’s annual Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History, brings together chapters by scholars at the forefront of contemporary scholarship on American women’s history. Each regards The Southern Lady as having shaped her historical perspective and inspired her choice of topics in important ways. These chapters demonstrate that the power of imagination and scholarly courage manifested in Scott’s and other early American women historians’ work has blossomed into a gracious plentitude.
