This work covers classic southern fiction - along with lesser-known works - with an eye to the ways that southern writers such as William Elliot, William Gilmore Simms, and William Faulkner depict hunting and outdoorsmanship. It explores the themes of honour, fair play, and noblesse oblige.

Jacob F. Rivers III has collected twenty-two classic hunting tales by twelve southern writers including Davey Crocket, Johnson J. Hooper, and Henry Clay Lewis. These stories spring not only from a genteel literary tradition but also from the tradition of the tall tale or stories of backwoods humor. Antebellum and post-Civil War tales reflect changes in the social and economic composition of the hunting class in the South. Some reveal themes of fear for the future of field sports, and others demonstrate an early conservation ethic among hunters and landowners. Early Southern Sports and Sportsmen brings to new readers a wealth of hunting and fishing lore heretofore hard to find by any but scholars in the field of southern literature. Rivers has gathered a host of well-read and well-heeled sportsmen who relish each and every detail of their encounters with their environment. Sports authors come from every spectrum of southern society, but their common vocabulary and shared enthusiasm bond them together. Rivers corrects unfortunate stereotypes of hunters as indifferent to aspects of nature other than environmental exploitation. Whether humorists or serious advocates, these authors reveal their sense of their place in the wild, and many advocate ecological good citizenship that disdains wanton slaughter and unethical practices. They condemn such acts as beneath the dignity and honor of true sportsmen. The collection includes accounts of hunting many types of game indigenous to the South from 1830 to 1910, from aristocratic foxhunts to yeoman deer drives. The structure is largely chronological, beginning with John James Audubon's essay on the American wild turkey from his Ornithological Biography (1832) and ending with stories from Alexander Hunter's The Huntsman in the South (1908). Whatever their era, the chief characteristics of these sporting accounts are the excitement the authors experience upon suddenly encountering game, the rigors and hardships they endure in its pursuit, their keen powers of observation of the woods and waters through which they travel, and the comedy often found in the strong friendships that frequently mark their adventures. But above all the tales resonate with a reverence for field sports as the means through which humans establish meaningful and lasting relationships with the mysteries and the magic of nature.

Giltner's thorough research using slave narratives, sportsmen's recollections, records of fish and game clubs, and sporting periodicals offers a unique perspective on the African-American struggle for independence from the end of the Civil War to the 1920s.

This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture reflects the dramatic increase in research on the topic of gender over the past thirty years, revealing that even the most familiar subjects take on new significance when viewed through the lens of gender. The wide range of entries explores how people have experienced, understood, and used concepts of womanhood and manhood in all sorts of obvious and subtle ways. The volume features 113 articles, 65 of which are entirely new for this edition. Thematic articles address subjects such as sexuality, respectability, and paternalism and investigate the role of gender in broader subjects, including the civil rights movement, country music, and sports. Topical entries highlight individuals such as Oprah Winfrey, the Grimke sisters, and Dale Earnhardt, as well as historical events such as the capture of Jefferson Davis in a woman's dress, the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia, and the Memphis sanitation workers' strike, with its slogan, "I AM A MAN." Bringing together scholarship on gender and the body, sexuality, labor, race, and politics, this volume offers new ways to view big questions in southern history and culture.

There's a strong interest in reading for pleasure or self-improvement in America, as shown by the popularity of Harry Potter, and book clubs, including Oprah Winfrey's. Although recent government reports show a decline in recreational reading, the same reports show a strong correlation between interest in reading and academic acheivement. This set provides a snapshot of the current state of popular American literature, including various types and genres. The volume presents alphabetically arranged entries on more than 70 diverse literary categories, such as cyberpunk, fantasy literature, flash fiction, GLBTQ literature, graphic novels, manga and anime, and zines. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a definition of the genre, an overview of its history, a look at trends and themes, a discussion of how the literary form engages contemporary issues, a review of the genre's reception, a discussion of authors and works, and suggestions for further reading. Sidebars provide fascinating details, and the set closes with a selected, general bibliography. Reading in America for pleasure and knowledge continues to be popular, even while other media compete for attention. While students continue to read many of the standard classics, new genres have emerged. These have captured the attention of general readers and are also playing a critical role in the language arts classroom. This book maps the state of popular literature and reading in America today, including the growth of new genres, such as cyberpunk, zines, flash fiction, GLBTQ literature, and other topics. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a definition of the genre, an overview of its history, a look at trends and themes, a discussion of how the literary form engages contemporary issues, a review of the genre's critical reception, a discussion of authors and works, and suggestions for further reading. Sidebars provide fascinating details, and the set closes with a selected, general bibliography. Students will find this book a valuable guide to what they're reading today and will appreciate its illumination of popular culture and contemporary social issues.

"For more than a quarter-century, despite the admirable excavations that have unearthed such humorists as John Gorman Barr and Marcus Lafayette, the most significant of the humorists from the Old Southwest have remained the same: Crockett, Longstreet, Thompson, Baldwin, Thorpe, Hooper, Robb, Harris, and Lewis. Forming a kind of shadow canon in American literature that led to Mark Twain's early work, from 1834 to 1867 these authors produced a body of writing that continues to reward attentive readers." "James H. Justus's Fetching the Old Southwest examines this writing in the context of other discourses contemporaneous with it: travel books, local histories, memoirs, and sports manuals, as well as unpublished private forms such as personal correspondence, daybooks, and journals. Like most writing, humor is a product of its place and time, and the works studied herein are no exception. The antebellum humorists provide an important look into the social and economic conditions that were prevalent in the southern "new country," a place that would, in time, become the Deep South." "While previous books about Old Southwest humor have focused on individual authors, Justus has produced the first critical study to encompass all of the humor from this time period. Teachers and students of literary history will appreciate the incredible range of documentation, both primary and secondary."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Includes "List of books indexed" (published also separately).

From slave narratives to the Civil War, and from country music to Southern sport, this Companion is the definitive guide to the literature and culture of the American South. Includes discussion of the visual arts, music, society, history, and politics in the region Combines treatment of major literary works and historical events with a survey of broader themes, movements and issues Explores the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Huston, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, as well as those - black and white, male and female - who are writing now Co-edited by the esteemed scholar Richard Gray, author of the acclaimed volume, A History of American Literature (Blackwell, 2003)

The goal of this special issue of American Literature is to encourage scholars in both the sciences and the humanities to estrange themselves from their regular ways of thinking. Committed to understanding what each discipline has to teach the other, the contributors explore the changes in topics, approaches, and methodologies in the sciences, technology and the humanities that surface when scholars take seriously the mandate to consider the basic assumptions of each field from the other point of view. The essays address the mutual impact of literature and science through a range of issues: "geek novels" as a subgenre of literature about science, the relationship of narrative form to risk analysis and ecological disaster, the impact of realism and contemporary developments in neurology and brain biology, and the use of technology in the humanities. The essays also examine how the humanities explore scientific issues such as in vitro fertilization and human existence, cloning and molecular biology, and the concept of time. Contributors. Jay Clayton, Wai Chee Dimock, N. Katherine Hayles, Ursula Heise, Randall Knoper, Martha Nell Smith, Stephanie Turner, Priscilla Wald, Robyn Wiegman