Passages – Transitions – Intersections.

Southern, African American and Native American Fiction

Gra?yna Maria Teresa Branny, Gra?yna Maria Teresa Branny, Gra?yna Maria Teresa Branny, Gra?yna Maria Teresa Branny, Gra?yna Maria Teresa Branny, Gra?yna Maria Teresa Branny

• Publisher: V&R Unipress
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9783847117179
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783847017172
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

This study of collective American memory exposes the historical phenomenon of self-directed American imperialism, still frequently ignored or denied in the United States. Over the course of the 250 years of its history, this has taken the form of African American slavery, thwarted black motherhood, same-race slavery (both white and African American) as well as the extermination of indigenous American peoples. On the literary level, the study helps to broaden, or even modify, the present perspective on the oeuvres of four major American writers, i. e., William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy, by pointing to the intertwining of their themes, motifs, and techniques of writing to form an intricate pattern of the intertextualized collective memory of the American nation.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Body
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: The Unspoken and the Unspeakable: Southern Taboos Aestheticized and Denegativized
• Chapter 1: The “Pearl Effect” of the Collective Amnesia of the South: Sisters, Brothers, and Fathers in Southern American Fiction
• Chapter 2: The Southern White Collective Subconscious: From William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury to Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark
• Part Two: Sin and Redemption: Southern White and African American Patriarchies
• Chapter 3: Demythologizing the South: McCarthy's Suttree v. Faulkner's Sutpen
• Chapter 4: “But it's not love”: Collective Memory and Patriarchy in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Toni Morrison's Love
• Part Three: Intra-racial Indenture and Slavery v. Gender and Racial Empowerment
• Chapter 5: Collective Memory and Re-Invention of Self in Toni Morrison's A Mercy
• Chapter 6: Southern Harlequinade and “the Signifying Monkey”: The (Un-)Known World of Edward P. Jones
• Part Four: Race‍(lessness) and Gender: “Miscuing” and “Signifying”
• Chapter 7: “Playing in the Dark” of Race and Gender in Morrison's Paradise
• Chapter 8: Collective Memory and Stereotyping in Faulkner's Light in August and Morrison's Paradise
• Chapter 9: A Dissolution of Otherness in Toni Morrison's Last Novel God Help The Child
• Part Five: Collective Memory and Trauma: African American Femininity and Motherhood
• Chapter 10: Thwarted Black Maternity in Morrison's Beloved and Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun
• Chapter 11: “Be‍[ware] the Furrow of his Brow”: Decolonization of Gender and Race in Morrison’s Paradise
• Part Six: Ethnicity and Assimilation: Historicity v. Ahistoricity
• Chapter 12: “Re-Memorying” in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Morrison's Song of Solomon, and Louise Erdrich's Tracks: Orality v. Literacy
• Chapter 13: Centripetal, Holistic and Curative: Collective Native American Memory in Erdrich's The Painted Drum
• Part Seven: Myth and Myth-making: Usable Past and the Burden of History
• Chapter 14: Ahistoricity as Ethnic Collective Memory in Erdrich's Native American Fiction: The Bingo Palace, Tracks and Love Medicine
• Chapter 15: History v. Myth: Collective American Amnesia in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in The West
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index