The U.S. South has always been a region in the process of constructing itself and being constructed by others, and has produced a rich body of literature that has variously imagined it as a place of great contrast with other areas of the United States and the Americas more generally. This course will consider the South though various literary forms including journals, short stories, novels, folk tales, and songs: from the Edenic visions of early diarists and correspondents, to the debates over slavery and secession leading up to the Civil War of 1861-5 in both written forms and oral traditions; from work by major writers such as George Washington Cable, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty to more recent fiction by Jesmyn Ward and music by Rhiannon Giddens. We will discuss the processes of self-fashioning involved in Southern writing and culture, as well as various ways in which such models are problematised: for instance, through African-American perspectives, through idiosyncratic places within the South such as New Orleans, and through recent critical moves to consider the region in wider hemispheric terms, away from strictly U.S.-oriented identities.
Module Supervisor's Research into Subject Area
Dr Owen Robinson has published and taught widely on the literature of the United States. His research is centred on writing from and about the US South, considering it in relation both to the wider United States and in terms of its relations with other places in the Americas. He is the author of Creating Yoknapatawpha: Readers and Writers in Faulkner's Fiction (Routledge, 2006) and several articles and book chapters on Faulkner and other writers. He is currently working on writing focussed on New Orleans, with his book Myriad City: Towards a Literary Geography of New Orleans due to be published by Liverpool University Press in 2016. With Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Peter Hulme, and Lesley Wylie, he is co-editor of Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio (Liverpool University Press, 2013).
- Module Supervisor: Owen Robinson