Southern Local Color

Stories of Region, Race, and Gender

Title Details

Pages: 392

Illustrations: 1 figure

Trim size: 6.120in x 9.250in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 01/10/2002

ISBN: 9-780-8203-2317-6

List Price: $34.95

Hardcover

Pub Date: 04/01/2017

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5260-2

List Price: $93.95

Southern Local Color

Stories of Region, Race, and Gender

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  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Contributors

Conflict, exoticism, sensuality, eccentricity, and the sheer differences of the American South pervade this lively anthology, the first in fifty years to focus exclusively on the nineteenth-century tradition of southern local color. Its thirty-one stories, spanning the 1870s through the early 1900s, represent some of the best southern fiction to appear during the great flowering of American local color writing.

The fifteen authors included here are those most admired by their contemporaries. Modern readers may recognize Kate Chopin, author of The Awakening; Charles Chesnutt, the courageous and gifted African American writer; or Joel Chandler Harris, whose Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit tales have remained continually in print. However some authors like suffragist Sarah Barnwell Elliott, are virtually unknown today, while others, like African Americans Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, are known primarily as poets or diarists.

The editors' extensive introduction locates the stories in the context of contemporary and current history and culture, and each selection of tales begins with detailed information on the author. Also included are bibliographies and extensive notes. Showcasing the many styles, topics, and settings of southern local color, the anthology reconnects us to an unjustly neglected literary tradition. As the editors make clear, such tales of the South were essential to post-Civil War America's struggle to address—yet contain—cultural and geographic variety, racial mixtures, and the just clamor of women and African Americans for equality.

From George Washington Cable's New Orleans to Thomas Nelson Page's Tidewater Virginia to the Appalachians imagined by Sherwood Bonner, these stories engage nation-shaping themes—war, segregation, immigration, depression, and suffrage—at the personal and community levels. In Southern Local Color we have a unique forum for pondering a timeless American question: how to reconcile our diversities with a unified national identity.

During the late 19th century a movement arose in American writing that tapped into regional differences in culture and, especially, dialects. . . . The book traces the fascinating evolution of this genre. . . . Taken in the context of the era in which they were written, these stories are remarkable. Students of Southern writing and culture will find this book informative and entertaining.

Louisiana Advocate

George Washington Cable

Samuel Clemens

Joel Chandler Harris

Charles W. Chesnutt

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson

Constance Fenimore Woolson

Katharine (Sherwood Bonner) McDowell

Mary Noailles Murfree

(Patrick) Lafcadio Hearn

Thomas Nelson Page

Grace King

Mollie E. Moore Davis

Sarah Barnwell Elliott

Kate Chopin

About the Author/Editor

Barbara C. Ewell (Editor)
BARBARA C. EWELL is a professor of English at Loyola University, New Orleans.

Pamela Glenn Menke (Editor)
PAMELA GLENN MENKE is a professor of English at Regis College.