Southern History
System of political disenfranchisement of the African American after the Civil War. These codes were only dissolved officially by the work of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the 24th amendment, which outlawed poll taxes.
Jim Crow
Excoriated Southern Studies scholars of the 1970s for their monolithic thinking about the South. Called for a refocus back to inter-regional complexity, diversity, and particularity.
C. Hugh Holman
Term for the horrid mutilation experienced, refracted, and metabolized emotionally by Benjy in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.
Castration
Accomodationist exponent of practical training. President of Tuskegee University. And key figure we have discussed but did not read
Booker T. Washington
New Orleans author of "Belles Demoiselles Plantation." Social realist critic of the American Deep South.
Georges Washington Cable
Laws in the Deep South that targeted African Americans who were unemployed, vagrant, "impudent," and, in some cases, for entering certain towns without advance notice and permission.
Black Codes
Co-editor of the Norton Anthology on The Literature of the American South. Her book The Power of the Porch describes how writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Harriet Jacobs use the symbolic space of the porch to reflect on the power of gossip and community surveillance.
Trudier Harris
His style of Southern frontier humor was adapted, alongside Hawthorne's Dark romanticism, to develop Faulkner's own unique approach to Southern Gothic.
Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain
Missouri Author of "Desiree's Baby" and controversial naturalist novel The Awakening.
Kate Chopin
This author's 1708 narrative poem "The Sot-Weed Factor" discussed the early Planter Class of the South. The poem was later adapted into John Barth's classic posthmodern picaresque novel of the same name.
Ebenezer Cook
The period after the end of the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1877.
Reconstruction
Critical opponent to Booker T. Washington. Elaborated the concepts of double consciousness and the the veil.
W.E.B. Du Bois
Southern Gothic novels and stories investigate the darker aspects of the human mind, including taboo desires. The 20th century school of thought that is often used to interpret these writer's ideas on the mind.
Psychoanalysis
Mary Boykin Chesnut
Local Color author whose wit and whose fusion of oral storytelling, comedy, and realism, alongside the Picaresque and the grotesque, skewered the 19th century South.
Daily Double: The name of his book of sketches.
Johnson Jones Hooper
Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallpoosa Volunteers
The year that enslaved African Americans were first brought to the Virginia Colony.
1619
Co-editor of the Norton Anthology on The Literature of the American South. Argues that many Harlem Reinaissance authors should also be included in the Southern Renascence.
Fred Hobson
Name of the author and his book. Crafted a version of the Southern Gothic based on Black Folk culture and the Agrarian rhythms of nature.
Jean Toomer and Cane
1926 short story describing the marital discord between Delia Jones and her abusive hisband Sykes.
"Sweat"
Pro-slavery author of the 1830s and 40s whose later work evinced an intense social realism. Financially supported "Poet Laureate of the Confederacy," Henry Timrod, after the end of the Civil War.
William Gilmore Simms
Name of the Spanish explorer who met and captured the Cherokee cacica, The Lady of Cofitachequi.
Hernando de Soto
Discovered the name of and biographical information about the author of the slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Jean Fagan Yellin
Famous 20th century Southern writer who we are not reading. Professor Ward is an expert on this figure.
Cormac McCarthy
Names of two indigenous (likely Cherokee) women discussed in our first readings of the semester.
Teresa Martin and Luisa Menendez
Great American Novel contender. Later adapted into Percival Everett's Pulitzer-prize winning novel James.
Huckleberry Finn