Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today

by Jan Nordby Gretlund (Editor)

Overview

An insightful guidebook to some of the best examples of modern Southern fiction, as selected by an international group of critics

In Still in Print, eighteen southern novels published since 1997 fall under the careful scrutiny of an international cast of accomplished literary critics to identify the very best of recent writings in the genre. These essays highlight the praiseworthy efforts of a pantheon of novelists celebrating and challenging regionality, unearthing manifestations of the past in the present, and looking to the future with wit and healthy skepticism.

Organized around shared themes of history, place, humor, and malaise, the novels discussed here interrogate southern culture and explore the region's promise for the future. Four novels reconsider the Civil War and its aftermath as Charles Frazier, Kaye Gibbons, Josephine Humphreys, and Pam Durban revisit the past and add fresh insights to contemporary discussions of race and gender through their excursions into history. The novels by Steve Yarbrough, Larry Brown, Chris Offutt, Barry Hannah, and James Lee Burke demonstrate a keen sense of place, rooted in a South marked by fundamentalism, poverty, violence, and rampant prejudice but still capable of promise for some unseen future. The comic fiction of George Singleton, Clyde Edgerton, James Wilcox, Donald Harington, and Lewis Nordan shows how southern humor still encompasses customs and speech reflected in concrete places. Ron Rash, Richard Ford, and Cormac McCarthy probe the depths of human existence, often with disturbing results, as they write about protagonists cut off from their own humanity and desperate to reconnect with the human race. Diverse in content but unified in genre, these particular novels have been nominated by the contributors to Still in Print for long-term survival as among the best modern representations of the southern novel.

Featuring:
M. Thomas Inge on Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain
Clara Juncker on Josephine Humphreys's Nowhere Else on Earth
Kathryn McKee on Kaye Gibbons's On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon
Jan Nordby Gretlund on Pam Durban's So Far Back
Tara Powell on Percival Everett's Erasure
Tom Dasher on Steve Yarbrough's The Oxygen Man
Jean Cash on Larry Brown's Fay
Carl Wieck on Chris Offutt's The Good Brother
Owen W. Gilman Jr. on Barry Hannah's Yonder Stands Your Orphan
Hans H. Skei on James Lee Burke's Crusader's Cross
Charles Israel on George Singleton's Work Shirts for Madmen
John Grammer on Clyde Edgerton's The Bible Salesman
Scott Romine on James Wilcox's Heavenly Days
Edwin T. Arnold on Donald Harington's Enduring
Marcel Arbeit on Lewis Nordan's Lightning Song
Thomas Ærvold Bjerre on Ron Rash's One Foot in Eden
Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. on Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land
Richard Gray on Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611172645
Publisher:	University of South Carolina Press
Publication date:	01/23/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
File size:	730 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jan Nordby Gretlund is the chair of the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark and the author of Eudora Welty's Aesthetics of Place and Frames of Southern Mind: Reflections on the Stoic, Bi-Racial&Existential South. He is also editor of Madison Jones' Garden of Innocence and The Southern State of Mind and coeditor of Realist of Distances: Flannery O'Connor Revisited; Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher; Southern Landscapes; The Late Novels of Eudora Welty; and Flannery O'Connor's Radical Reality.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Introduction: A Time of Excellence in Southern Fiction 1

Part I A Sense of History

Cold Mountain Charles Frazier cM.Thomas Inge 19

Nowhere Else on Earth Josephine Humphreys Clara Juncker 29

On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon Kaye Gibbons Kathryn Mckee 43

So Far Back Pam Durban Jan Nordby Gretlund 58

Erasure Percival Everett Tara Powell 73

Part II A Sense of Place

The Oxygen Man Steve Yarbrough Thomas E. Dasher 91

Fay Larry Brown Jean W. Cash 105

The Good Brother Chris Offutt Carl Wieck 119

Yonder Stands Your Orphan Barry Hannah Owen W. Gilman 135

Crusader's Cross James Lee Burke Hans H. Skei 148

Part III A Sense of Humor

Work Shirts for Madmen George Singleton Charles Israel 165

The Bible Salesman Clyde Edgerton John Grammer 174

Heavenly Days James Wilcox Scott Romine 189

Enduring Donald Harington Edwin T. Arnold 203

Lightning Song Lewis Nordan Marcel Arbeit 216

Part IV A Sense of Malaise

One Foot in Eden Ron Rash Thomas Ærvold Bjerre 233

The Lay of the Land Richard Ford Robert H. Brinkmeyer 248

The Road Cormac McCarthy Richard Gray 260

Contributors 275

Index 281

What People are Saying About This

Charles Reagan Wilson

Imaginatively conceived and well crafted, Still in Print is essential reading to understand contemporary writers' visions of the American South. Gretlund is a thoughtful and insightful guide to the relationship between earlier southern writers and those engaging the South's new social realities. The volume succeeds fully in its goals of leading readers to key texts and emphasizing the continuing significance of reading southern literature. Teachers of literature and southern studies will be grateful for the sheer usefulness of these essays that provide so much biographical and critical information.