Susan C. Cook
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195365870
- eISBN:
- 9780199932054
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195365870.003.0016
- Subject:
- Music, Opera, History, Western
This chapter looks at the dialogics between opera, art song and parlor ballads, blackface minstrelsy, spirituals, and crooning in the art and identity of the early twentieth-century prima donna. ...
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This chapter looks at the dialogics between opera, art song and parlor ballads, blackface minstrelsy, spirituals, and crooning in the art and identity of the early twentieth-century prima donna. Singing mammy songs enabled Alma Gluck to comply with a pervasive American Africanism in the United States, while mitigating her alterity both as a woman of Romanian Jewish ancestry and as a professional opera singer. But it also acknowledged the intimate, symbiotic relationship between the mammy and the high-born Southern lady, which shaped ideas of female vocality, domesticity, and maternalism profoundly in the American imagination. In addition, this chapter’s discussion highlights how radically the development of commercial recording unsettled the categories of “high art” and “popular art,” and exposed perceptions of “color” and “class” in vocal performance to manipulation and renegotiation.Less
This chapter looks at the dialogics between opera, art song and parlor ballads, blackface minstrelsy, spirituals, and crooning in the art and identity of the early twentieth-century prima donna. Singing mammy songs enabled Alma Gluck to comply with a pervasive American Africanism in the United States, while mitigating her alterity both as a woman of Romanian Jewish ancestry and as a professional opera singer. But it also acknowledged the intimate, symbiotic relationship between the mammy and the high-born Southern lady, which shaped ideas of female vocality, domesticity, and maternalism profoundly in the American imagination. In addition, this chapter’s discussion highlights how radically the development of commercial recording unsettled the categories of “high art” and “popular art,” and exposed perceptions of “color” and “class” in vocal performance to manipulation and renegotiation.
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.
Leonard Rogoff
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469630793
- eISBN:
- 9781469630816
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469630793.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This biography recounts the life of a Southern citizen activist whose career of social advocacy extended from the end of Reconstruction to the civil-rights movement. Born in 1879 in Goldsboro, North ...
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This biography recounts the life of a Southern citizen activist whose career of social advocacy extended from the end of Reconstruction to the civil-rights movement. Born in 1879 in Goldsboro, North Carolina, into a German-Jewish family with antebellum southern roots, Weil was a cosmopolitan in a provincial society. Graduating from Smith College, she returned to Goldsboro and joined the Women's Club movement where as “Federation Gertie” she advocated for women's rights and against the exploitation of child and woman millworkers. As president of the state women's suffrage league, she fought but ultimately failed to win ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In 1920 she became founding president of the North Carolina League of Women Voters, using it as base for progressive social legislation. In the Depression years, she worked for labor rights and poverty relief. Weil was both a Southern Lady, holding traditional social values, and a New Woman, forging a public career in the civic marketplace. An observant Reform Jew, she inherited from her mother a commitment to Zionism. Active in organizations dedicated to world peace and internationalism, she abandoned her pacifism in World War II and worked to save her German family from the Holocaust. Her last crusade, prior to her death in 1971, was in support of black civil rights.Less
This biography recounts the life of a Southern citizen activist whose career of social advocacy extended from the end of Reconstruction to the civil-rights movement. Born in 1879 in Goldsboro, North Carolina, into a German-Jewish family with antebellum southern roots, Weil was a cosmopolitan in a provincial society. Graduating from Smith College, she returned to Goldsboro and joined the Women's Club movement where as “Federation Gertie” she advocated for women's rights and against the exploitation of child and woman millworkers. As president of the state women's suffrage league, she fought but ultimately failed to win ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In 1920 she became founding president of the North Carolina League of Women Voters, using it as base for progressive social legislation. In the Depression years, she worked for labor rights and poverty relief. Weil was both a Southern Lady, holding traditional social values, and a New Woman, forging a public career in the civic marketplace. An observant Reform Jew, she inherited from her mother a commitment to Zionism. Active in organizations dedicated to world peace and internationalism, she abandoned her pacifism in World War II and worked to save her German family from the Holocaust. Her last crusade, prior to her death in 1971, was in support of black civil rights.
