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The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell
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Robert L. McDonald
Book Code: GR0072
ISBN: 0-313-30072-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-30072-1
336 pages, chronology
Greenwood Press
Publication: 8/30/1997
List Price: $110.95 (UK Sterling Price: £65.00)
Availability: Out of stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects:
Series Title: Critical Responses in Arts and Letters
Series Number: 28
Reviews:
  • The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell has much to commend it.
    —Mississippi Quarterly
Description: Author of such classics of 20th-century popular American literature as Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), Erskine Caldwell was something of a celebrity nearly all his life. But he was also a serious writer, one whose merits are as considerable as they remain underexplored. In the 1930s, he startled the literary world with his frank portrayals of the poor whites of the South. Beginning in the early 1940s, critics grew suspicious that he had exhausted his originality and his talent. In the late 1960s, some scholars began an effort, which continues intermittently today, to reconsider Caldwell's achievement. This collection of reviews, critical essays, and book excerpts provides a chronological portrait of the often contradictory and unfailingly colorful critical response to Caldwell from 1931 to the present. The 57 pieces collected in this volume were chosen to represent all sides and perspectives in the evolving critical opinion of Caldwell's work. The items are grouped in sections representing three chronological periods that encompass the prevailing critical moods concerning his writings: the 1930s, when readers of many persuasions found him promising and held out great hopes for his development; 1940 to 1968, when increasing critical scrutiny led to his dismissal as a writer of significance; and 1969 to the present, when there have been several substantial efforts to reconsider Caldwell's achievement. An introductory essay argues that Caldwell remains largely absent from our critical consciousness today because of a prevailing willingness among academics to rely on largely negative received opinions about his books in place of primary experience with them. The introduction is followed by a chronology, and the volume concludes with an extensive selected bibliography.
Table of Contents:
  • Series Foreword by Cameron Northouse
  • Preface
  • A Caldwell Chronology
  • Introduction
  • Erskine Caldwell's (Non)Readers and the Problem of Literary Reputation by Robert L. McDonald
  • The 1930s: "Great Hopes" and Controversy
  • Two Judgments of "American Earth" (1931) by T.K. Whipple and Malcolm Cowley
  • A Hardboiled Idealist (1931) by Norman Macleod
  • The Poetry of Unfeeling (1931) by Gerald Sykes
  • Review of Tobacco Road (1932) by James Gray
  • Poor Whites (1932) by Jonathan Daniels
  • Raw Leaf (1932) by Edward Dahlberg
  • Passion and Pellagra (1932) by Jack Conroy
  • American Humor (1932) by Kenneth White
  • Farm and Mill (1933) by Jonathan Daniels
  • Review of God's Little Acre (1933) by Edwin Rolfe
  • Review of God's Little Acre (1933) by Bennett A. Cerf
  • Modern American Writing (1933) by Whit Burnett
  • "God's Little Acre": An Analysis (1934) by Lawrence S. Kubie, M.D.
  • Caldwell Repeats Himself (1935) by Horace Gregory
  • Priapus in Georgia (1935) by William Troy
  • Caldwell: Maker of Grotesques (1935) by Kenneth Burke
  • Erskine Caldwell's New Short Stories (1935) by Harold Strauss
  • --and Other Stories (1935) by Robert M. Coates
  • Review of Kneel to the Rising Sun (1935) by James Gray
  • Sweet Are the Uses of Degeneracy (1936) by John Donald Wade
  • Pictures of the South, Drunk on Cotton (1937) by Hudson Strode
  • A Compelling Album of the Deep South (1937) by Robert Van Gelder
  • Erskine Caldwell (1937) by Vernon Loggins
  • Star-Dust Above "Tobacco Road" (1938) by J. H. Marion, Jr.
  • New Short Stories by Erskine Caldwell (1938) by Harold Strauss
  • Erskine Caldwell's Picture Book (1938) by Donald Davidson
  • Naturalistic Modes: The Gothic, The Ribald, and the Tragic (1939) by Shields McIlwaine
  • 1940-1968: The Consequences of Criticism
  • Jeeter Lester, Agrarian Par Excellence (1940) by Peter A. Carmichael
  • Lynching Bee (1940) by Richard Wright
  • Caldwell Comes a Cropper (1942) by Margaret Marshall
  • Duck Soup for Tobacco Roaders (1943) by Stanley Walker
  • Erskine Caldwell's Terrifying World (1944) by Dan S. Norton
  • Review of Stories by Erskine Caldwell (1944) by Harry Sylvester
  • American Lower Depths (1944) by Jonathan Daniels
  • Review of Tragic Ground (1944) by James Gray
  • The Two Erskine Caldwells (1944) by Malcolm Cowley
  • Folk and Culture in the Novels of Erskine Caldwell (1945) by John Miller Maclachlan
  • Erskine Caldwell: The Nearly Animal Kingdon (1947) by George Snell
  • Vice Is What Sells! (1948) by "Patsy"
  • Erskine Caldwell: The Dangers of Ambiguity (1950) by W. M. Frohock
  • One Side of Caldwell (1951) by Granville Hicks
  • Chamber of Horrors--Southern Exposure (1952) by Edward Wagenknecht
  • Notes on Erskine Caldwell (1953) by Robert Hazel
  • Erskine Caldwell: A Note for the Negative (1956) by Carl Bode
  • Caldwell's Characters: Why Don't They Leave? (1957) by Robert Cantwell
  • [Southern Local Colorists] (1963) by John M. Bradbury
  • From Violence in Recent Southern Fiction (1965) by Louise Y. Gossett
  • 1969-1995: Reconsiderations
  • Erskine Caldwell and Southern Religion (1971) by James J. Thompson, Jr.
  • Rediscovering Erskine Caldwell (1975) by Morris Renek
  • True Myth-Maker of the Post-Bellum South (1975) by Calder Willingham
  • Repetition as Technique in the Short Stories of Erskine Caldwell (1977) by Scott MacDonald
  • The Comedy of Frustration (1977) by Richard Gray
  • Reasons for Reading, Studying, and Teaching Erskine Caldwell (1979) by Scott MacDonald
  • Is That You in the Mirror, Jeeter?: The Reader and Tobacco Road (1979) by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.
  • The Sacrilege of Alan Kent and the Apprenticeship of Erskine Caldwell (1979) by Guy Owen
  • Caldwell's Fiction: Growing Towards Trash? (1989) by Sylvia Jenkins Cook
  • Canonize Caldwell's Georgia Boy: A Case for Resurrection (1989) by Ronald Wesley Hoag
  • The Rhetoric of Exhaustion and the Exhaustion of Rhetoric: Erskine Caldwell in the Thirties (1993) by Jay Watson
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Index
LC Card Number: 97-16239
LCC Class: PS3505
Dewey Class: 813
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