Appalachian Fiction

7 Key excerpts on "Appalachian Fiction"

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  eBook - ePub

  High Mountains Rising

  APPALACHIA IN TIME AND PLACE

  • Richard A. Straw, H. Tyler Blethen(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Illinois Press

    (Publisher)

  ...When addressing literary works written since 1977, I will attempt to elucidate the new themes— as well as the reinterpretations of older themes—that reflect more recent socioeconomic changes within and outside the region. Duly noted will be significant developments in the critical and popular receptions of Appalachian literature, whether works by individual authors or the region’s literary canon as a whole. The earliest and most ambitious of the previously published efforts to survey Appalachian literature was Cratis Williams’s 1961 dissertation “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction,” which has long been one of the most influential texts in the interdisciplinary field of Appalachian studies. Williams’s dissertation was not a truly comprehensive study of the region’s literature; he assessed representations of Appalachian people and culture exclusively in novels and narrative nonfiction works published through the 1950s and ignored nonnarrative literary genres (e.g., certain types of nonfiction, poetry, lyric songs). W. D. Weatherford’s and Wilma Dykeman’s impressionistic 1962 essay in The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey (edited by Thomas R. Ford) investigated a wider range of literary genres than did Williams’s dissertation, yet the former is more problematic from a scholarly standpoint. While accounting for a wide range of literary works about the region or by regional authors through the 1950s, Weatherford’s and Dykeman’s essay expressed positions that are today considered romantic or fallacious. For example, claiming that “the traditional folk arts may well find their last refuge between the covers of a few books,” Weatherford and Dykeman inadvertently endorsed the practice of literary “fakelore” found in many twentieth-century books about Appalachia...

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  Studying Appalachian Studies

  Making the Path by Walking

  • Chad Berry, Philip J. Obermiller, Shaunna L. Scott(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University of Illinois Press

    (Publisher)

  ...2010, 144). They also noted that Appalachian literature contains diversity “because the region itself is amorphous and it’s changing, it’s shifting, not only geographically and culturally but politically and in many other ways, so . . . it’s a tremendously rich time when you have cultural shifts like that” (144). The doors to Appalachian experience continue to open when taking into consideration the point of view of African Americans, immigrant, and urban populations who are now seeking to explore the region (see Walker on page 150). The panel also recognized the act of holding one another’s writing accountable to the hard truths even as writers shared resources and provided encouragement. Speaking of the past, they recognized that most Appalachian writers have “not just a sense of the depth of the past, the personal past, the communal past, but also the geologic past” about the region to which they feel an “obligation” to teach about the faults of misleading literary portrayals of Appalachia (such as the 1993 Kentucky Cycle) and the “responsibility to look at the truth [of realities about such issues of drug abuse and poverty] and put that in our writing” (see Mann on page 148; Holbrook on pages 149 and 152; and Worthington on page 153). Looking to the future, the authors noted the outpouring of students and younger writers bringing in new visions and renewing the field, the breaking of whose century-old ground this essay has charted. Central to the great outpouring of good literature (that goes well beyond Appalachian studies) stands the community of writers and activists and scholars who work together in locales that we consider part of Appalachian studies. In many ways, such people have felt like outsiders to prescribed identities, for they do not fit well into the roles their race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, or locality have given them...

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  Writing Appalachia

  An Anthology

  • Katherine Ledford, Theresa Lloyd, Rebecca Stephens(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  ...We rely on the excellent specialized anthologies of Appalachian writing to flesh out the stories for those readers who seek more. Another way that we wanted to break new ground was by including authors from Northern Appalachia. We acknowledge that there are strong arguments for not doing so and for focusing instead on what John Alexander Williams calls “core” Appalachia—that is, the southern mountains as defined by Campbell and others. 17 Aside from the precedent set by previous anthologies and collections of scholarship, along with the southern-focused expectations of readers who encounter the word “Appalachia,” it is in writings from the southern highlands that one finds the “shared themes and narrated stances,… [the] repeated and revised tropes” that, according to Henry Louis Gates, are the hallmark of a literary movement. 18 But as Katherine Ledford notes, incorporating Northern Appalachian authors invites us to engage in comparative regional studies—for example, to examine the concept of the American frontier in the writings of New Yorker James Fenimore Cooper as well as in the southern account of Anne Newport Royall, or to study the effects of extractiveindustrial economies in Jason Miller’s Pennsylvania and Harry Caudill’s Kentucky. Scholars of the South may wonder how we distinguish Appalachian literature from its non-montane cousins of the Upland South...

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  Teaching in Times of Crisis

  Applying Comparative Literature in the Classroom

  • Mich Yonah Nyawalo(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ...As a region, Appalachia has historically been caricatured as an isolated, rural, anti-modern, and homogeneous place. Thus, these projected images of isolated homogeneity appear to be incompatible with a world literature perspective—especially one that privileges artistic modes of circulation and intercultural exchanges on a global scale. In The Invention of Appalachia, Allen Batteau explains that “the image of Appalachia as a strange land and peculiar people was elaborated at the very same time that the relationships of external domination and control of the Southern Mountain Region’s natural and human resources were being elaborated. Until very recently, the idea of Appalachia has deflected attention away from the political interests that contributed to the definition of the region, at times in a manner that denied the basic premises of those interests” (15). Caricatures of Appalachia and its inhabitants were thus used to legitimize specific economic and political interests while concealing systemic forms of violence. As Batteau contends, in the image, it was not the speculative greed of the planters for the land but the love of freedom of the mountaineers that led them to settle in the mountain wilderness; it was not the manipulation of antagonisms by the aristocrats but the lawlessness of the hillbillies that led to the feuds; in the prevailing image it was not the monopolization of public services in the lowlands but the degeneracy of the highlanders that produced high levels of poverty and illiteracy. (15) Cultural traits projected onto Appalachia were thus used to legitimize the continued exploitation of the region. The constructed image of Appalachia also provided a space for those residing outside the region to articulate their social anxieties about the present...

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  Literature and Ecofeminism

  Intersectional and International Voices

  • Douglas A. Vakoch, Sam Mickey, Douglas A. Vakoch, Sam Mickey(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ...7 Ecofeminist sensibilities and rural land literacies in the work of contemporary Appalachian novelist Ann Pancake Theresa L. Burriss Appalachians’ attachment to place has endured throughout centuries. Loyal Jones identified mountain residents’ love of place as significant in his seminal essay, “Appalachian Values.” In his description he explains: We are oriented around places. We never forget our native places, and we go back as often as possible. […] Our folksongs tell of our regard for the land where we were born. It is one of the unifying values of mountain people, this attachment to one’s place, and it is a great problem to those who urge mountaineers to find their destiny outside the mountains. (Jones 1975, 512–513) Even though Jones penned “Appalachian Values” in the early 1970s, and admitted the values could be interpreted as overly simplistic and essentialist, he asserted the necessity of countering decades of reductive, negative stereotyping. And despite Central/South Central Appalachia’s 1 evolving, dynamic cultures that respond to regional, national, and international influences, residents’ love of place has persisted over time and was re-energized by the 1960s and 1970s-era counter-cultural “back-to-the-land” movement. 2 This strong cultural value is evident in the region’s literature, where the natural environment figures prominently, often assuming character status equal, if not superior, to humans. A long tradition of both male and female Appalachian authors 3 highlights the deep connections between women and nature. During the preparation of her work, The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature (2003), Elizabeth S.D...

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  Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics

  Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance

  • Phil Jamison(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University of Illinois Press

    (Publisher)

  ...Around the same time, industrialists legitimized logging and mining operations in the mountains as a way to “lift up” the Appalachian people. Today, state agencies use the idea of Appalachia to promote tourism in the mountains and to market cultural heritage—craft shops sell “Appalachian” crafts; festivals feature “Appalachian” music. Historian Henry Shapiro, however, has questioned whether Appalachia even exists as a distinct place, or whether it is merely a romantic idea created in the late nineteenth century by the local-color writers, and one that persists today, making the southern mountains one of the most misunderstood and mythologized regions of the United States. 10 As John Campbell pointed out in 1921, Appalachia is “a land…about which, perhaps, more things are known that are not true than any other part of the country.” 11 Cultural traditions such as music and dance, which are passed on from one generation to the next, are clearly not contained by state lines, rivers, elevations, or other boundaries drawn on maps, and as people migrated through the Appalachian region and across the South during the nineteenth century, these customs became established in communities far beyond the southern mountains. Pointing out that the traditional music of Appalachia is not significantly different from that found elsewhere in the rural South, country music historian Bill Malone has suggested that “there is no such thing as ‘Appalachian music.’” 12 Some might argue that this is also true of the “Appalachian” dances; these folk traditions likewise were not unique to the mountains but at one time could be found throughout the South...

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  Appalachian Health

  Culture, Challenges, and Capacity

  • F. Douglas Scutchfield, Randy Wykoff(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  ...This belief appears as early as the accounts of Virginia planter and surveyor William Byrd II in the 1720s, and it was firmly ensconced by the writers of the local color, or literary regionalism, movement of the late 1800s. In 1899 William Goodell Frost promoted this stereotype in the Atlantic magazine, describing Appalachian residents as “our contemporary ancestors”: At the close of the Revolutionary War there were about two and one half million people in the American colonies. Today there are in the Southern mountains approximately the same number of people—Americans for four and five generations—who are living to all intents and purposes in the conditions of the colonial times!. .. Their remoteness is by no means measured by the mere distance in miles. It is a longer journey from northern Ohio to eastern Kentucky than from America to Europe; for one day’s ride brings us into the eighteenth century. 22 This view, one of the most pervasive and denigrating myths about Appalachians, has been widely repeated in both academic writing and popular culture. In the mid-twentieth century British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, “In fact, the Appalachian ‘mountain people’ to-day are no better than barbarians. They have relapsed into illiteracy and witchcraft. They suffer from poverty, squalor and ill-health. . .. [They] represent the melancholy spectacle of a people who have acquired civilization and then lost it.” This stereotype was also a central theme of the rediscovery of Appalachia in the 1960s, figuring prominently in Kentucky minister Jack Weller’s widely read Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia (1965) and in Bruce and Nancy Roberts’s Where Time Stood Still: A Portrait of Appalachia. The latter wrote: “For many years the lack of roads and the natural difficulties of travel through mountain areas resulted in isolation for those who lived there...

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