New Orleans: A Literary History

Author:   T. R. Johnson (Tulane University, Louisiana)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781108705660


Pages:   399
Publication Date:   08 June 2023
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

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New Orleans: A Literary History


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Author:   T. R. Johnson (Tulane University, Louisiana)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.10cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.576kg
ISBN:  

9781108705660


ISBN 10:   1108705669
Pages:   399
Publication Date:   08 June 2023
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Preface T. R. Johnson; 1. Swamp City Anthony Wilson; 2. Mixed motives: writing for French audiences from colonial New Orleans Erin Greenwald; 3. 'As I have seen and known it': ex-slave autobiographers and the New Orleans Slave Market Calvin Schermerhorn; 4. What New Orleans Meant to Walt Whitman Ed Folsom; 5. Coloring sex, love, and desire in Creole New Orleans's long nineteenth century Jarrod Hayes; 6. The white Creole tradition: Alfred Mercier, Charles Gayarré, Adrien Rouquette, and Grace King Rien Fertel; 7. The Civil War's literary aftershocks: George Washington Cable Matthew Smith; 8. Illusion and disillusion: the making of Lafcadio Hearn S. Frederick Starr; 9. Local color, social problems, and the living dead in the late nineteenth-century short fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson Tara T. Green; 10. Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier, and the predicament of the intellectual woman in New Orleans Emily Toth; 11. Converging Americas: New Orleans in Spanish-language and Latina/o/x literary culture Kirsten Silva Greusz; 12. A Jazz origin-myth: Bras Coupe in history, folklore, and literature Bryan Wagner; 13. 'Stepping out' of the storyville frame: recent literary representations of the New Orleans red light district Milena Marinkova; 14. Louis Armstrong's autobiographical art Daniel Stein; 15. New Orleans, modernism, and The Double Dealer, 1921–1926 Thomas Bonner; 16. 'Because what else could he have hoped to find in New Orleans, if not the truth': William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Thadious Davis; 17. 'The place I was made for': Tennessee Williams in New Orleans Henry I. Schvey; 18. A Civil Rights era novel of the American Civil War: Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels William Bedford Clark; 19. How to survive the best environments: narrating Protean place in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer Richmond M. Eustis, Jr; 20. Tom Dent and the development of black literature in New Orleans Kalamu Ya Salaam; 21. The gothic tradition in New Orleans Taylor Hagood; 22. A Flaneur in the French Quarter and beyond: John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces Cory MacLauchlin; 23. Literary fiction by New Orleans women, 1961–2003: Shirley Anne Grau, Ellen Gilchrest, Sheila Bosworth, and Valerie Martin Monica Carol Miller; 24. Asian American New Orleans Marguerite Nguyen; 25. New Orleans rap and bounce: recovering and archiving an expressive tradition Holly Hobbs; 26. The literature of Hurricane Katrina Kevin Rabalais; Afterword: swan song? T. R. Johnson; Contributors biographies; Index.

Reviews

'Anyone giving serious consideration to the writing of New Orleans must have this book. T. R. Johnson has brought together between these covers a stunning collection of essays that never fail to delight and occasionally shock. This book expertly captures the varied essence of the great city: its fatalism, its history, it magic.' Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of We Cast a Shadow 'Johnson has performed a Herculean service, giving us a book that plumbs the hidden depths of a literary legacy alternately as dark and as hilarious as only honest writing about New Orleans can be. Sure, the music, the food, the architecture; but also, Johnson shows us, the literature of New Orleans is like that of no other place.' Dan Baum, author of Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans 'A profound and lyrical book about the literary history of the Big Easy.' Bernice L. McFadden, author of The Book of Harlan 'World history, American history, music history - all unthinkable without New Orleans, the city that was 'day and night a show'. Now T. R. Johnson and a state-of-the-scholarship crew of contributors offer a panorama of new perspectives on this unique city's always-vivid literature. If you think you know New Orleans, read on, and prepare to be amazed, challenged, entertained, and horrified. If you teach New Orleans culture, this book is an indispensable tool.' Ned Sublette, author of The World that Made New Orleans 'Fatalism has stalked New Orleans almost from the moment convicts and enslaved Africans dragged it from the mud. Plague-stricken, flood prone, and more Caribbean than American concerning matters that make survival worthwhile, the town has attracted an outsize quota of top-flight writers who have memorialized it in a literature of lasting significance. In assembling an eclectic array of scholarly talent on the subject seldom found between the covers of the same book, T. R. Johnson has put us all in his debt.' Lawrence N. Powell, author of Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans 'It's not possible to write in New Orleans without writing about New Orleans. The city saturates the imagination, casting an irresistible and enervating spell. New Orleans writers must contrive to sink and swim at the same time. T. R. Johnson's collection of essays, as eclectic as the figures on a local Voodoo altar, invites the reader to discover how far back the peculiar strains of fatalism and irony that color the world view of the New Orleanian really go. No other American city has consistently offered a literature that is at once so appealing and so alien to the rest of the country. New Orleans: The Literary History is a welcome guide to that fabulous reality found only on the printed page.' Valerie Martin, author of Property 'What T. R. Johnson has assembled in New Orleans: The Literary History is a tremendous contribution to the city's self-understanding - and to everyone's understanding of the city's impact on broader literary histories. With an embracing, inclusive agility, the book excavates layers of culture and language to deliver a comprehensive, international vision of three hundred years' worth of writing, from the published letters of an Ursuline nun in the 1730s to the sissy bounce music of Big Freedia today. Taken together, these scholars present an argument for how New Orleans's literary history has shaped our sense of the pleasures of cities in general and also of the urban imagination itself as a dynamic, shifting thing, with poetry, fiction, memoir and drama intertwining throughout New Orleans's history like the forces that create its legendary climate of heat, humidity, and storm.' Ed Skoog, author of Run the Red Lights


Author Information

T. R. Johnson is a Professor of English and Weiss Presidential Fellow at Tulane University, Louisiana. He has written books about Lacanian psychoanalysis, the teaching of writing, and about prose-style. He has also taught at Boston University and the University of Louisville.

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