This military history examines the complex factors surrounding the execution of an American militia colonel in British-occupied Charleston, SC. South Carolina patriot militiamen played an integral role in helping the Continental army reclaim their state from its British conquerors. In Martyr of the American Revolution, Cordell L. Bragg, III, examines the events that set Col. Isaac Hayne into a disastrous conflict with two British officers, his execution in Charleston, and the repercussions that extended from South Carolina to the Continental Congress and the halls of British Parliament. Hayne was the most prominent American executed by the British for treason. He and his two principal antagonists, Lt. Col. Nisbet Balfour and Lt. Col. Francis Lord Rawdon, were unwittingly set on a collision course that climaxed in an act that sparked one of the war’s most notable controversies. Martyr of the American Revolution sheds light on why two professional soldiers were driven to commit a seemingly arbitrary deed that halted prisoner exchange and nearly brought disastrous consequences to captive British officers. The death of a patriot in the cause of liberty was not a unique occurrence, but the unusually well-documented events surrounding the execution of Hayne and the involvement of his friends and family makes his story compelling and poignant. Unlike young Capt. Nathan Hale, who suffered a similar fate in 1776, Hayne did not become a folk hero. Yet his execution became an international affair debated in both Parliament and the Continental Congress.

A History of the Literature of the U.S. South provides scholars with a dynamic and heterogeneous examination of southern writing from John Smith to Natasha Trethewey. Eschewing a master narrative limited to predictable authors and titles, the anthology adopts a variegated approach that emphasizes the cultural and political tensions crucial to the making of this regional literature. Certain chapters focus on major white writers (e.g., Thomas Jefferson, William Faulkner, the Agrarians, Cormac McCarthy), but a substantial portion of the work foregrounds the achievements of African American writers like Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sarah Wright to address the multiracial and transnational dimensions of this literary formation. Theoretically informed and historically aware, the volume's contributors collectively demonstrate how southern literature constitutes an aesthetic, cultural and political field that richly repays examination from a variety of critical perspectives.

Just Below South is the first book to examine the U.S. South and the Caribbean as a "regional interculture" shaped by performance--as a space defined not so much by a shared set of geographical boundaries or by a single, common culture as by the weave of performances and identities moving across and throughout it. By offering fresh ways for thinking about region, language, and performance, the volume helps to reimagine the possibilities for American Studies. It advances beyond current analyses of historical or literary commonalities between the South and the Caribbean to explore startling and significant connections between a range of performances, including Trinidadian carnival, Civil War reenactments, the Martinican dance form kalenda, dramatic adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, rituals of spirit possession, the teaching of Haitian Kreyòl, the translation of Louisiana Creole, and the imaginative "travels" of southern and Caribbean writers. While generating textual conversations among scholars of Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone literature and culture and forging innovative ties between cultural studies, performance studies, linguistics, literary analysis, and studies of the African diaspora, these essays raise provocative new questions about race, ethnicity, gender, class, and nationality. ContributorsJessica Adams, University of California, Berkeley * Carolyn Vellenga Berman, The New School * Anne Malena, University of Alberta * Cécile Accilien, Columbus State University, Georgia * Don E. Walicek, University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras * Julian Gerstin, San Jose State University * Rawle Gibbons, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine * Kathleen M. Gough, University of Glasgow * Shirley Toland-Dix, University of South Florida, Tampa * Michael P. Bibler, University of Mary Washington * Jana Evans Braziel, University of Cincinnati

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching Southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South--global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South--that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of Southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum Southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth-century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of Southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical Southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.

The American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.

In May 1997, a group of distinguished historians announced the formation of the Historical Society, an organization that sought to be free of the jargon-laden debates and political agendas that have come to characterize the profession. Eugene Genovese, Prsident of the Society, explained the commitment to form a new and genuinely diverse organization. "The Society extends from left to right and embraces people of every ideological and political tendency. The Society promotes frank debate in an atmosphere of civility, mutual respect, and common courtesy. All we require is that participants lay down plausible premises; reason logically; appeal to evidence; and prepare to exchange criticism with those who hold different points of view. Our goal: to promote an integrated history accessible to the public." From those beginnings, the Society has grown to include hundreds of members from every level of the profession, from Pulitzer-prize winning scholars to graduate students, across the ideological and political spectrum. In this first book from the Historical Society, several founding members explore central topics within the field; the enduring value of the practice of history; the sensitive use of historical records, sources, and archives; the value of common standards; and much more. An engaging and challenging work that will appeal to scholars, students, educators, and the many public readers who have become lost in the culture wars, Reconstructing History is sure to generate the kind of civil, reasoned debate that is a foundational goal of the Historical Society. Contributors include Walter A. McDougall, Marc Trachtenberg, Alan Charles Kors, Deborah A. Symonds, Leo P. Ribuffo, Bruce Kuklick, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Edward Berkowitz, John Patrick Diggins, John Womack, Victor Davis Hanson, Miriam R. Levin, Martin J. Sklar, Eugene D. Genovese, Daniel C. Littlefield, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Russell Jacoby, Rochelle Gurstein, Paul Rahe, Donald Kagan, Diane Ravitch, Sean Wilentz, Louis Ferleger and Richard H. Steckel.

A turn-of-the-century map of where Faulkner studies have traveled and where they are headed

This comprehensive Companion to William Faulkner reflects the current dynamic state of Faulkner studies. Explores the contexts, criticism, genres and interpretations of Nobel Prize-winning writer William Faulkner, arguably the greatest American novelist Comprises newly-commissioned essays written by an international contributor team of leading scholars Guides readers through the plethora of critical approaches to Faulkner over the past few decades Draws upon current Faulkner scholarship, as well as critically reflecting on previous interpretations

Essays by Susan V. Donaldson, Lael Gold, Adam Gussow, Martin Kreiswirth, Jay Parini, Noel Polk, Judith L. Sensibar, Jon Smith, and Priscilla Wald William Faulkner once said that the writer “collects his material all his life from everything he reads, from everything he listens to, everything he sees, and he stores that away in sort of a filing cabinet . . . in my case it's not anything near as neat as a filing case; it's more like a junk box.” Faulkner tended to be quite casual about his influences. For example, he referred to the South as “not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don't have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time.” His Christian background, according to him, was simply another tool he might pick up on one of his visits to “the lumber room” that would help him tell a story. Sometimes he claimed he never read James Joyce's Ulysses or had never heard of Thomas Mann—writers he would elsewhere declare as “the two great men in my time.” Sometimes he expressed annoyance at readers who found esoteric theory in his fiction, when all he wanted them to find was Faulkner: “I have never read [Freud]. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby-Dick didn't.” Nevertheless, Faulkner's life was rich in what he did, saw, and read, and he seems to have remembered all of it and put it to use in his fiction. Faulkner's Inheritance is a collection of essays that examines the influences on Faulkner's fiction, including his own family history, Jim Crow laws, contemporary fashion, popular culture, and literature.