New Orleans

A Literary History

T. R. Johnson

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781108498197
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108624718
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. This book provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Swamp City
• Chapter 2 Mixed Motives: Writing for French Audiences from Colonial New Orleans
• Chapter 3 ''As I Have Seen and Known It'': Ex-Slave Autobiographers and the New Orleans Slave Market
• Chapter 4 What New Orleans Meant to Walt Whitman
• Chapter 5 Coloring Sex, Love, and Desire in Creole New Orleans's Long Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 6 The White Creole Tradition: Alfred Mercier, Charles Gayarré, Adrien Rouquette, and Grace King
• Chapter 7 The Civil War's Literary Aftershocks: George Washington Cable
• Chapter 8 Illusion and Disillusion: The Making of Lafcadio Hearn
• Chapter 9 Local Color, Social Problems, and the Living Dead in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Short Fiction of Alice Dunbar Nelson
• Chapter 10 Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier, and the Predicament of the Intellectual Woman in New Orleans
• Chapter 11 Converging Americas: New Orleans in Spanish-Language and Latina/o/x Literary Culture
• Chapter 12 A Jazz Origin Myth: Bras-Coupé in History, Folklore, and Literature
• Chapter 13 ''Stepping Out'' of the Storyville Frame: Recent Literary Representations of the New Orleans Red-Light District
• Chapter 14 Louis Armstrong's Autobiographical Art
• Chapter 15 New Orleans, Modernism, and The Double Dealer, 1921–1926
• Chapter 16 ''Because What Else Could He Have Hoped to Find in New Orleans, If Not the Truth'': William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
• Chapter 17 ''The Place I Was Made For'': Tennessee Williams in New Orleans
• Chapter 18 A Civil Rights–Era Novel of the American Civil War: Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels
• Chapter 19 How to Survive the Best Environments: Narrating Protean Place in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer
• Chapter 20 Tom Dent and the Development of Black Literature in New Orleans
• Chapter 21 The Gothic Tradition in New Orleans
• Chapter 22 A Flaneur in the French Quarter and Beyond: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces
• Chapter 23 Literary Fiction by New Orleans Women, 1961–2003: Shirley Ann Grau, Ellen Gilchrist, Sheila Bosworth, and Valerie Martin
• Chapter 24 Asian American New Orleans
• Chapter 25 New Orleans Rap and Bounce: Recovering and Archiving an Expressive Tradition
• Chapter 26 The Literature of Hurricane Katrina
• Chapter 27 Swan Song?
• Index