Songs of the New South Writing Contemporary Louisiana

Subjects:

• Literature » American Literature

Reviews:

• ...for students exploring relationships between literature and regional culture, beginning undergraduates and above.
  —Choice November 2001

• Endorsement From Elizabeth Brown-Guillory
  Professor of English
  Associate Dean
  University of Houston: In Songs of the New South: Writing Contemporary Louisiana, [the authors] take the exploration of Louisianan language and culture beyond its written manifestation. As an anthology of literary criticism, Songs of the New South takes a holistic approach to literary anaylsis; the editors and contributing writers filter Louisiana's contemporary literature through critical, historical, and anthropological lenses. The result is a novel and insightful appraisal of Louisiana's contemporary literature, a valuable new resource for research as well as personal enrichment. Songs of the New South tackles Louisiana culture on multiple levels, from the realm of the political to the realm of the supernatural; fresh criticism of canon staples like Ernest Gaines, Zora Neale Hurston, and Kate Chopin is placed alongside scholarly analyses of romance/horror novelist Anne Rice. It is a fascinating read.
• Endorsement From Anne E. Rowe
  Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
  The Florida State University: Songs of the New South: Writing Contemporary Louisiana, edited by Suzanne Disheroon Green and Lisa Abney, is a comprehensive and highly reasonable collection of critical articles about well known and not so well known Louisiana writers....Green and Abney's collection is valuable for several reasons. It shows the breadth of literature by Louisiana writers; it presents good scholarship by both junior and senior scholars in the field; and, perhaps, most important, it kindles a desire to enjoy some old favorites and to learn more about lesser known but also excellent Louisiana writers.
• Endorsement From Joan Hall Wylie
  Instructor in English
  University of Mississippi: Suzanne Disheroon Green and Lisa Abney create a literary Preservation Hall with a collection that gives repeated testimony to Louisiana's unique appeal to Crane and many other contemporary authors, as varied a group as Ernest Gaines and Anne Rice. Neither the authors nor the 20 essayists who discuss their work are mired in mossy swamps of the past, however; instead, they explore Louisiana's oral narrative tradition, its atypical religious heritage, and its drama of race and gender in modern--even postmodern--contexts. Songs of the New South rings with the music of Louisiana voices and the blues-to-zydeco moments of Louisiana lives.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Writing Louisiana: A New Generation Tells Their Stories
• Louisiana Narrative and Folk Traditions
• Living on the Edge in Rebecca Well's Little Altars Everywhere by Mary Ann Wilson
• Food and Foodways in Michael Lee West's She Flew the Coop: A Novel Concerning Life, Death, Sex, and Recipes in Limoges, Louisiana by Lisa Abney
• Toole's Louisiana Voice in The Neon Bible by Patricia A. Threatt
• The Kingfish as Author: Huey Long's Two Political Autobiographies by Philip Dubuisson Castille
• Locating Community in Contemporary Southern Fiction: Analyzing Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Erin E. Campbell Cash
• The Spell of the Swampland: The Gulf Coast Fictions of Shirley Ann Grau by Sally Blanton
• Outside of Time: Dave Robicheaux and the Criminal Kind of Postmodern Louisiana by Thomas Easterling
• From Huey Long to Willie Stark: Louisiana Politics in All the King's Men by Harold Woodell
• Paganism, Papism, Protestantism, and the New Southern Religion
• Postmodernism Goes South: John Dufresne's Louisiana Power and Light by David J. Caudle
• Fiction is My Religion: Conversations with John Dufresne by Kevin Blaine Bell and David J. Caudle
• Invoking Generational Demons: Orality and Catholicism in The Witching Hour by Kenneth Price and Shelby Posrak
• The Complicated Catholicism of Andre Dubus by Michael Cocchiarale
• Lady of the Earth and Moon: Goddess Imagery and the Ya Yas by Lori Rowlett
• Black Cat Bone and Snake Wisdom: New Orleans Hoodoo, Haitian Voodoo, and Rereading Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God by Pamela Glenn Menke
• Three Castes of Race and Gender
• Awakening the Essence of Blue: The Emerging Southern Women of Kate Chopin and Moira Crone by Suzanne Disheroon Green
• Equality for African American (Wo)Men: Quests for Masculinity in Ernest Gaines's Bloodline by Laurie Champion
• Against Regulations: Southern Women in the Fiction of Rebecca Wells by Patricia M. Grant
• Ellen Gilchrist's Heroines, the Scourge of New Orleans by Mary McCay
• Rape and Redemption: The Revision of Colored Female Chastity in Pauline Hopkin's Contending Forces and Anne Rice's The Feast of All Saints by Amy Anastasia Birge
• Bloodlines: Representations of Black and White Creoles in the Fiction of Ernest Gaines by Keith Byerman