Writing Appalachia

Writing Appalachia PDF Author: Katherine Ledford
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813178827
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 842

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Book Description
Despite the stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding Appalachia, the region has nurtured and inspired some of the nation's finest writers. Featuring dozens of authors born into or adopted by the region over the past two centuries, Writing Appalachia showcases for the first time the nuances and contradictions that place Appalachia at the heart of American history. This comprehensive anthology covers an exceedingly diverse range of subjects, genres, and time periods, beginning with early Native American oral traditions and concluding with twenty-first-century writers such as Wendell Berry, bell hooks, Silas House, Barbara Kingsolver, and Frank X Walker. Slave narratives, local color writing, folklore, work songs, modernist prose—each piece explores unique Appalachian struggles, questions, and values. The collection also celebrates the significant contributions of women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community to the region's history and culture. Alongside Southern and Central Appalachian voices, the anthology features northern authors and selections that reflect the urban characteristics of the region. As one text gives way to the next, a more complete picture of Appalachia emerges—a landscape of contrasting visions and possibilities.

Writing Appalachia

Writing Appalachia PDF Author: Katherine Ledford
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813178827
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 842

Get Book

Book Description
Despite the stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding Appalachia, the region has nurtured and inspired some of the nation's finest writers. Featuring dozens of authors born into or adopted by the region over the past two centuries, Writing Appalachia showcases for the first time the nuances and contradictions that place Appalachia at the heart of American history. This comprehensive anthology covers an exceedingly diverse range of subjects, genres, and time periods, beginning with early Native American oral traditions and concluding with twenty-first-century writers such as Wendell Berry, bell hooks, Silas House, Barbara Kingsolver, and Frank X Walker. Slave narratives, local color writing, folklore, work songs, modernist prose—each piece explores unique Appalachian struggles, questions, and values. The collection also celebrates the significant contributions of women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community to the region's history and culture. Alongside Southern and Central Appalachian voices, the anthology features northern authors and selections that reflect the urban characteristics of the region. As one text gives way to the next, a more complete picture of Appalachia emerges—a landscape of contrasting visions and possibilities.

Listen Here

Listen Here PDF Author: Sandra L. Ballard
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813143586
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1048

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Book Description
“A comprehensive and unsurpassed anthology of women writers from Appalachia . . . Exceptional in diversity and scope.” —Southern Historian Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia is a landmark anthology that brings together the work of 105 Appalachian women writers, including Dorothy Allison, Harriette Simpson Arnow, Annie Dillard, Nikki Giovanni, Denise Giardina, Barbara Kingsolver, Jayne Anne Phillips, Janice Holt Giles, George Ella Lyon, Sharyn McCrumb, and Lee Smith. Editors Sandra L. Ballard and Patricia L. Hudson offer a diverse sampling of time periods and genres, established authors and emerging voices. From regional favorites to national bestsellers, this unprecedented gathering of Appalachian voices displays the remarkable talent of the region’s women writers who’ve made their mark at home and across the globe. “A giant step forward in Appalachian studies for both students and scholars of the region and the general reader . . . Nothing less than a groundbreaking and landmark addition to the national treasury of American literature.” —Bloomsbury Review “A remarkable accomplishment, bringing together the work of 105 female Appalachian writers saying what they want to, and saying it in impressive bodies of literature.” —Lexington Herald-Leader “One of the keenest pleasures in Listen Here lies in its diversity of voices and genres.” —Material Culture “Besides introducing readers to many new voices, the anthology provides a strong counterpart to the stereotype of hillbillies that have cursed the region.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Full of welcome surprises to those new to this regional literature: specifically, it includes particularly strong selections from children’s fiction and a substantial number of African American writers.” —Choice

Back Talk from Appalachia

Back Talk from Appalachia PDF Author: Dwight B. Billings
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813143349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Appalachia has long been stereotyped as a region of feuds, moonshine stills, mine wars, environmental destruction, joblessness, and hopelessness. Robert Schenkkan's 1992 Pulitzer-Prize winning play The Kentucky Cycle once again adopted these stereotypes, recasting the American myth as a story of repeated failure and poverty--the failure of the American spirit and the poverty of the American soul. Dismayed by national critics' lack of attention to the negative depictions of mountain people in the play, a group of Appalachian scholars rallied against the stereotypical representations of the region's people. In Back Talk from Appalachia, these writers talk back to the American mainstream, confronting head-on those who view their home region one-dimensionally. The essays, written by historians, literary scholars, sociologists, creative writers, and activists, provide a variety of responses. Some examine the sources of Appalachian mythology in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Others reveal personal experiences and examples of grassroots activism that confound and contradict accepted images of ""hillbillies."" The volume ends with a series of critiques aimed directly at The Kentucky Cycle and similar contemporary works that highlight the sociological, political, and cultural assumptions about Appalachia fueling today's false stereotypes.

Literacy in the Mountains

Literacy in the Mountains PDF Author: Samantha NeCamp
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813178886
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
After the 2016 presidential election, popular media branded Appalachia as "Trump Country," decrying its inhabitants as ignorant fearmongers voting against their own interests. And since the 1880s, there have been many, including travel writers and absentee landowners, who have framed mountain people as uneducated and hostile. These stereotypes ultimately ward off potential investments in the region's educational system and skew how students understand themselves and the place they call home. Attacking these misrepresentations head on, Literacy in the Mountains: Community, Newspapers, and Writing in Appalachia reclaims the long history of literacy in the Appalachian region. Focusing on five Kentucky newspapers printed between 1885 and 1920, Samantha NeCamp explores the complex ways readers in the mountains negotiated their local and national circumstances through editorials, advertisements, and correspondence. In local newspapers, community action groups announced meeting times and philanthropists raised funds for a network of hitherto unknown private schools. Preserved in print, these stories and others reveal an engaged citizenry specifically concerned with education. Combining literacy and journalism studies, NeCamp demonstrates that Appalachians are not—and never have been—an illiterate, isolated people.

Appalachia and Beyond

Appalachia and Beyond PDF Author: John Lang
Publisher: Univ Tennessee Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
The last quarter-century has seen a remarkable outpouring of fiction and poetry from southern Appalachia-a surge of creativity that has formed an integral part of a larger, and still growing, regional self-consciousness. This book charts the course of this literary renaissance through twenty-one interviews with contemporary Appalachian writers, conversations conducted between 1983 and 2003 at Emory & Henry College's annual literary festival and originally printed in the Iron Mountain Review. The authors interviewed range from nationally known figures such as Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan, Lee Smith, Mary Lee Settle, and Charles Wright to less prominent, though no less gifted, writers like George Ella Lyon, Jo Carson, and George Scarborough. Many of the interviewers are themselves creative writers or Appalachian studies scholars, as well as longtime friends of the interviewees. For example, Jim Wayne Miller interviews James Still; Loyal Jones interviews Jim Wayne Miller; Richard Marius interviews Wilma Dykeman; George Garrett interviews David Huddle; and Michael Chitwood interviews Michael McFee. These wide-ranging conversations address such topics as formative experiences in the author's childhood, major literary influences, the author's educational background and mentors, the writing process, the limitations imposed by such labels as “Appalachian writer,” and the broadening scope of literature originating in the Appalachian region. Collectively, these interviews confirm the judgment of some observers that writers from the mountain South are now playing a much larger role in southern letters than in previous periods, thus constituting a “renaissance within a renaissance.”

Bloodroot

Bloodroot PDF Author: Joyce Dyer
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081314339X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Winner of the 1997 Appalachian Studies Award Appalachian Writers Association 1999 Book of the Year Winner of the Susan Koppleman Award of the Popular Culture Association for Best Edited Collection in Women's Studies Joyce Dyer is director of writing and associate professor of English at Hiram College, Ohio."

Deviant Hollers

Deviant Hollers PDF Author: Zane McNeill
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813199328
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future uses the lens of queer ecologies to explore environmental destruction in Appalachia while mapping out alternative futures that follow from critical queer perspectives on the United States' exploitation of the land. With essays by Lis Regula, Jessica Cory, Chet Pancake, Tijah Bumgarner, MJ Eckhouse, and other essential thinkers, this collection brings to light both emergent and long-standing marginalized perspectives that give renewed energy to the struggle for a sustainable future. A new and valuable contribution to the field of Appalachian studies, rural queer studies, Indigenous studies, and ethnographic studies of the United States, Deviant Hollers presents a much-needed objection to the status quo of academic work, as well as to the American exceptionalism and white supremacy pervading US politics and the broader geopolitical climate. By focusing on queer critiques and acknowledging the status of Appalachia as a settler colony, Deviant Hollers offers new possibilities for a reimagined way of life.

Seekers of Scenery

Seekers of Scenery PDF Author: Kevin E. O'Donnell
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572332782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
An anthology of nineteenth-century travel writing about southern Appalachia, reflecting a body of magazine travel writing that emerged during a period in which the region was being discovered and defined within mainstream American culture.

Degrees of Elevation

Degrees of Elevation PDF Author: Charles Dodd White
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781933964393
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
16 stories of Appalachia today by some of our top writers. This collection brings us into the present with its struggles and beauty. Human character remains strong in these stories of life in Appalachia. Writers include: Rusty Barnes, Sheldon Lee Compton, Jarrid Deaton, Richard Hague, Silas House, Chris Holbrook, Denton Loving, Mindy Beth Miller, John McManus, Jim Nichols, Valerie Nieman, Chris Offutt, Mark Powell, Ron Rash, Alex Taylor, Crystal Wilkinson

A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia

A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia PDF Author: Rose McLarney
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820356247
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Getting acquainted with local flora and fauna is the perfect way to begin to understand the wonder of nature. The natural environment of Southern Appalachia, with habitats that span the Blue Ridge to the Cumberland Plateau, is one of the most biodiverse on earth. A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia—a hybrid literary and natural history anthology—showcases sixty of the many species indigenous to the region. Ecologically, culturally, and artistically, Southern Appalachia is rich in paradox and stereotype-defying complexity. Its species range from the iconic and inveterate—such as the speckled trout, pileated woodpecker, copperhead, and black bear—to the elusive and endangered—such as the American chestnut, Carolina gorge moss, chucky madtom, and lampshade spider. The anthology brings together art and science to help the reader experience this immense ecological wealth. Stunning images by seven Southern Appalachian artists and conversationally written natural history information complement contemporary poems from writers such as Ellen Bryant Voigt, Wendell Berry, Janisse Ray, Sean Hill, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Deborah A. Miranda, Ron Rash, and Mary Oliver. Their insights illuminate the wonders of the mountain South, fostering intimate connections. The guide is an invitation to get to know Appalachia in the broadest, most poetic sense.