Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts / Edition 1

by Anne Goodwyn Jones, Susan V. Donaldson

Overview

In Haunted Bodies, Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson have brought together some of our most highly regarded southern historians and literary critics to consider race, gender, and texts through three centuries and from a wealth of vantage points. Works as diversive as eighteenth-century court petitions and lyrics of 1970s rock music demonstrate how definitions of southern masculinity and femininity have been subject to bewildering shifts and disabling contradictions for centuries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813917269
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	03/01/1998
Series:	The American South Series
Pages:	548
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Anne Goodwyn Jones is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida. Susan V. Donaldson is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the College of William and Mary. Both have lectured and published widely on gender and the South.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Haunted Bodies: Rethinking the South through Gender	1
Part 1	Passages: From Africa to the American South
	The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South	23
	African-American Women and Their Pursuit of Rights through Eighteenth-Century Spanish Texts	56
Part 2	Victorian Southerners: Playing the Gentleman, Playing the Lady
	Poe and Gentry Virginia: Provincial Gentleman, Textual Aristocrat, Man of the Crowd	79
	The Flight down the Middle Walk: Mary Chesnut and the Forms of Observance	109
	Reconstructing Southern Manhood: Race, Sentimentality, and Camp in the Plantation Myth	132
Part 3	Slavery and Southern Genders: Douglass and Jacobs, Jacobs and Douglass
	Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass's "The Heroic Slave"	159
	Santa Claus Ain't a Real Man: Incidents and Gender	185
	Engendered in the South: Blood and Irony in Douglass and Jacobs	201
Part 4	Where the Heart Is: Southern Strains of American Domesticity
	Domesticity in Dixie: The Plantation Novel and Uncle Tom's Cabin	223
	The Dining Room Door Swings Both Ways: Food, Race, and Domestic Space in the Nineteenth-Century South	243
	Writing Sickness: A Southern Woman's Diary of Cares	257
Part 5	Bending Genders in the Modern South: Old Fears, New Desires
	Beyond the Hummingbird: Southern Women Writers and the Southern Gargantua	287
	Biting the Hand That Writes You: Southern African-American Folk Narrative and the Place of Women in Their Eyes Were Watching God	319
	Around, behind, above, below Men: Ratliff's Buggies and the Homosocial in Yoknapatawpha	343
Part 6	Contemporary Gender Wars: The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s
	Freedom, Manhood, and White Male Tradition in 1970s Southern Rock Music	369
	Reading Family Matters	389
	Nonfelicitous Space and Survivor Discourse: Reading the Incest Story in Southern Women's Fiction	416
Part 7	The Past in the Present: Retelling Southern Histories
	The True Happenings of My Life: Reading Southern Women Autobiographers	443
	Slavery, Race, and the Figure of the Tragic Mulatta; or, The Ghost of Southern History in the Writing of African-American Women	464
	Gender, Race, and Allen Tate's Profession of Letters in the South	492
	Contributors	519
	Selected Name and Title Index	525

Editorial Reviews

The editors contend that stories of southern bodies<-->from the southern white lady praised for her lack of sexual desire, to black Jezebels and lynching victims accused of too much desire<-->have been structured, to a large extent, by interlocking aspects of gender, race, and class. An eclectic group of contributors interrogate southern texts ranging from late 18th-century accounts of slavery to contemporary fiction by women. They include private diaries by white women, slave narratives, 1970s southern white rock music, and southern women's autobiographies. Paper edition (1726-3), $22.50. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

The collection will help to shape -- and in some cases completely reshape -- the critical discourse on the works and authors included. -- Will Brantley

Will Brantley