Fancy Strut

Fancy Strut PDF Author: Lee Smith
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Speed, Alabama is frantically preparing for the event of a lifetime: Sesquicentennial Week. And all her proud citizens are kicking up their heels in a lively, pompous fancy strut.

Fancy Strut

Fancy Strut PDF Author: Lee Smith
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Speed, Alabama is frantically preparing for the event of a lifetime: Sesquicentennial Week. And all her proud citizens are kicking up their heels in a lively, pompous fancy strut.

Dancing in the Flames

Dancing in the Flames PDF Author: Linda Byrd Cook
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786453508
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book examines Lee Smith’s novel-length fiction and its powerful reflection of her personal search for and journey toward spiritual reconciliation. The protagonists of Smith’s novels feel estranged from any sense of feminine sacredness as they struggle for a belief system that offers them hope and validation. Chapters describe how Smith has retrieved in her fiction a source of transformative power—the power of the sexual, maternal, feminine divine—in hopes of creating a new image of the total, sacred female whose sexuality, creativity, spirituality, and maternity can reside comfortably in the bodies of everyday heroines.

The World Is Our Home

The World Is Our Home PDF Author: Jeffrey J. Folks
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813185599
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
Since the early 1970s southern fiction has been increasingly attentive to social issues, including the continuing struggles for racial justice and gender equality, the loss of a sense of social community, and the decline of a coherent regional identity. The essays in The World Is Our Home focus on writers who have explicitly addressed social and cultural issues in their fiction and drama, including Dorothy Allison, Horton Foote, Ernest J. Gaines, Jill McCorkle, Walker Percy, Lee Smith, William Styron, Alice Walker, and many others. The contributors provide valuable insights into the transformation of southern culture over the past thirty years and probe the social and cultural divisions that persist. The collection makes an important case for the centrality of social critique in contemporary southern fiction.

Understanding Lee Smith

Understanding Lee Smith PDF Author: Danielle N. Johnson
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611178819
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
A comprehensive treatment of the life and work of this award-winning feminist Appalachian writer Since the release of her first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, in 1968, Lee Smith has published nearly twenty books, including novels, short stories, and memoirs. She has received an O. Henry Award, Sir Walter Raleigh Award, Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction, and a Reader's Digest Award; and her New York Times best-selling novel, The Last Girls, won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. While Smith has garnered academic and critical respect for many of her novels, such as Black Mountain Breakdown, Oral History, and Fair and Tender Ladies, her writing has been viewed by some as lightweight fiction or even "chick lit." In Understanding Lee Smith Danielle N. Johnson offers a comprehensive analysis of Smith's work, including her memoir, Dimestore, treating her as a major Appalachian and feminist voice. Johnson begins with a biographical sketch of Smith's upbringing in Appalachia, her formal education, and her career. She explicates the themes and stylistic qualities that have come to characterize Smith's writing and outlines the criticism of Smith's work, particularly that which focuses on female subjectivity, artistry, religion, history, and place in her fiction. Too often, Johnson argues, Smith's consistent and powerful messages about artistry, gender roles, and historical discourse are missed or undervalued by readers and critics caught up in her quirky characters and dialogue. In Understanding Lee Smith, Johnson offers an analysis of Smith's oeuvre chronologically to study her growth as a writer and to highlight major events in her career and the influence they had on her work, including a major shift in the early 1990s to writing about families, communities, and women living in the mountains. Johnson reveals how Smith has refined her talent for creating nuanced voices and a narrative web of multiple perspectives and evolved into a writer of fine literary fiction worthy of critical study.

Conversations with American Writers

Conversations with American Writers PDF Author: Dale Brown
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802862284
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
For years, Dale Brown has interviewed American writers, listening particularly for what they have to say about "wrestling with the sacred" in their writing. In this book, a follow-up to his earlier collection, Of Fiction and Faith, Brown gives readers the opportunity to listen in on his thoughtful conversations with ten contemporary writers.While many of these authors shy away from being labeled "Christian" writers, they all have much truth to tell through their work as they struggle with expressing both faith and doubt. The conversations recorded here offer a fresh dialogue on the power of art to sustain faith in unexpected ways.Interviews with: Eleanor Taylor Bland, David James Duncan, Terence Faherty, Ernest Gaines, Philip Gulley, Ron Hansen, Silas House, Jan Karon, Sheri Reynolds, Lee Smith.

Writing the Woman Artist

Writing the Woman Artist PDF Author: Suzanne W. Jones
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512809594
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
"I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill."—Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women Writing The Woman Artist is a collection of essays that explores the ways in which women writers portray women painters, sculptors, writers, and performers. Surveying the works of a variety of women writers—from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from different ethnic, national , racial, and economic backgrounds—this book treats their revisions of the Künstlerroman and their perceptions of the relationships between muse, artist, and audience in other genres. Suzanne W. ]ones and her collaborators seek to understand how representations of women artists and their poetics and politics are mediated by social and historical factors, including literary movements and theories of language. In doing so, they make an important contribution to the field of feminist scholarship, and generate new ways of understanding how the dynamics of creativity intersect with the dynamics of gender. Contributors to the volume are Ann Ardis, Alison Booth , Kathleen Brogan, Lynda Bundtzen, Pamela Caughie, Mary DeShazer, Linda Dittmar, Josephine Donovan, Susan Stanford Friedman , Gayle Greene, Linda Hunt, Katherine Kearns, Holly Laird, Estella Lauter, Z. Nelly Martinez, Jane Atteridge Rose, Margaret Diane Stetz, Renate Voris, and Mara Witzling. Writing The Woman Artist is a valuable new resource for scholars and students working in the fields of European and American literature and women's studies.

Lee Smith

Lee Smith PDF Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476636664
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
This literary companion surveys the works of Lee Smith, a Southern author lauded for her autobiographical familiarity with Appalachian settings and characters. Her dialogue captures the distinct voices of mountain people and their perceptions of local and world events, ranging from the Civil War to ecology and modernization. Mental and physical disability and the Southern cultural norm of including the disabled as both family and community members are recurring themes in Smith's writing. An A to Z arrangement of entries incorporates specific titles, and themes such as belonging, healing and death, humor, parenting and religion.

Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group

Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group PDF Author: Louisiana State University Press
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807142356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This work examines the history of Hollins College, which by the 1950s had set itself up as a school with a significant women's writing programme. It examines the influence of the mentors in the 1960s and the writers themselves, such as Lee Smith and Annie Dillard.

Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers

Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers PDF Author: Laurie Champion
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031307643X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
American women writers have long been creating an extraordinarily diverse and vital body of fiction, particularly in the decades since World War II. Recent authors have benefited from the struggles of their predecessors, who broke through barriers that denied women opportunities for self-expression. This reference highlights American women writers who continue to build upon the formerly male-dominated canon. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for more than 60 American women writers of diverse ethnicity who wrote or published their most significant fiction after World War II. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes:^L^DBLA brief biography^L^DBLA discussion of major works and themes^^DBLA survey of the writer's critical reception^L^DBLA bibliography of primary and secondary sources

A Brief History of American Literature

A Brief History of American Literature PDF Author: Richard Gray
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444392468
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
A Brief History of American Literature offers students and general readers a concise and up-to-date history of the full range of American writing from its origins until the present day. Represents the only up-to-date concise history of American literature Covers fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction, as well as looking at other forms of literature including folktales, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller and science fiction Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past twenty years Offers students an abridged version of History of American Literature, a book widely considered the standard survey text Provides an invaluable introduction to the subject for students of American literature, American studies and all those interested in the literature and culture of the United States