Louisiana State University Press

The History of Southern Women’s Literature

Edited by Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks

http://lsumvs.sncc.lsu.edu/lsupress/spring2002_books/books/perry.html

Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors
are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate
Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora
Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice
Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a
writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip
on her life, Mary Louise Weaks and Carolyn Perry have
produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and
enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their
comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively
young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the
career woman, embracing black and white, poor and
privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and
experiences.

The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows
readers both to explore individual authors and to follow
the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct
books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters;
the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel;
autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and
newspaper writing—these and more receive close
attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here,
and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from
four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the
myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned
social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life
behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations;
poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle
Tom’s Cabinand the influence of Gone with the Wind.

The History of Southern Women’s Literature tells,
ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an
“insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This
teeming volume validates the deep contributions and
pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a
major achievement in women’s and literary studies.

Carolyn Perry is associate professor of English at
Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Mary Louise
Weaks is Hazel Koch Professor of English at Rockford
College in Illinois. They previously coedited the
anthology Southern Women’s Writing: Colonial to
Contemporary.

Southern Literary Studies
Fred Hobson, Editor

Published with the assistance of the V. Ray Cardozier Fund



Forthcoming
June 2002
744 pages
6 x 9
ISBN 0-8071-2753-1
$49.95s

The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs

Edited by Joseph M. Flora and Lucinda H. MacKethan
Associate Editor: Todd Taylor

There are many competing anthologies of southern literature, but this is the first companion. Neither a survey of

masterpieces nor a biographical sourcebook, The  Companion to Southern Literature treats every conceivable

topic found in southern writing from the pre-Columbian era to the present, referencing specific works of all periods and genres.

Description of contents:

• 500 lively, succinct articles on topics ranging from Abolition to Yoknapatawpha

• 250 contributors, including scholars, writers, and poets

• 2 tables of contents—alphabetical and subject—and a complete index

• A separate bibliography for most entries

Joseph M. Flora is Atlanta Professor of Southern Culture and
formerly chair of the English Department at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author or editor of
many books, including Southern Writers: A Biographical
Dictionary and Rediscovering Vardis Fisher: Centennial
Essays.

Lucinda H. MacKethan is professor of English at North
Carolina State University in Raleigh and has published
numerous works on American women’s literature and slavery,
including Daughters of Time: Creating Women’s Voice in
Southern Story.

Southern Literary Studies
Fred Hobson, Editor
 
 January 2002 1,144 pages 8 x 10
 ISBN 0-8071-2692-6
 $59.95s

Lemoyne d’Iberville: Soldier of New France

Nellis M. Crouse
With a New Introduction by Daniel H. Usner Jr.

“Lemoyne d’Iberville rescues Iberville from the unjustified neglect into
which he has fallen in the English-speaking world.”—New York Times

When Nellis M. Crouse’s Lemoyne d’Iberville was originally published in
1954, the New York Times declared that the work “closes a gap in North
American historical biography.” Indeed, the book was the first and only
full-length English-language biography of the great leader of French
Louisiana. Now, in the even busier field of French colonial history,
Crouse’s work still has plenty to offer. He explores the Canadian origins
and military career of Iberville and his many campaigns, emphasizes the
relationship between private gain and public service in Iberville’s rise
through the ranks, and stresses the importance of family networks in both
the commerce and government of New France. With a new introduction by
historian Daniel H. Usner to set the book in historiographical perspective,
this edition is especially timely as the Pelican State looks forward to the
2003 bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase.

Nellis M. Crouse, now deceased, was the author of several works on
French colonial history, including French Pioneers in the West Indies,
1624–1664.

Daniel H. Usner Jr., professor of history and director of the American
Indian Program at Cornell University, is the author of American Indians
in the Lower Mississippi Valley.

Forthcoming 2001
304 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
ISBN 0-8071-2700-0 (paper)
$18.95Tr

William Henry Drayton
South Carolina Revolutionary Patriot

Keith Krawczynski

“The most insightful and complete biography of Drayton yet written as
well as an excellent narrative of the revolutionary movement in South
Carolina.”—Walter Fraser, author of Patriots, Pistols, and Petticoats

In this exhaustive biography, Keith Krawczynski details the political and
social career of William Henry Drayton (1742–1779), an ambitious, wealthy
lowcountry planter and zealous patriot leader who was at the center of
Revolutionary activity in South Carolina from 1774 until his death five years
later. Considered the most effective Whig polemicist in the lower South,
Drayton served on all his state’s important Revolutionary governing bodies,
commanded a frigate of war, was elected chief justice in 1776, coauthored
South Carolina's 1778 constitution, and represented the state in the
Constitutional Congress from 1778 until his demise. Although Drayton was
a leading radical and the central figure of the American Revolution in South
Carolina, historians have largely ignored his contributions. With William
Henry Drayton, Krawczynski removes this fascinating man from the
shadows of history.

Drayton was an improbable rebel. After receiving his formal education in
England, the South Carolina–born Drayton returned to his birthplace as a
planter and continued to espouse Royalist ideals. During a later visit to
Britain, he was hailed as a champion of British sovereignty. Yet, disgruntled
with the king's increasing infringement on American liberties, Drayton
embraced the rebel cause with the zealotry of a recent convert and eventually
did more to resist British rule than any other resident of the Palmetto State.

By rescuing this real South Carolina patriot from the ash heap of history,
William Henry Drayton proves essential to a complete understanding of the
American Revolution in that state.

Keith Krawczynski is assistant professor of history at Auburn University
at Montgomery.

Southern Biography Series
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Editor

Forthcoming 2001
432 pages
6 x 9
15 halftones
ISBN 0-8071-2661-6
$59.95s

The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860

Leonard L. Richards



Was the United States a slaveocracy at its foundation?

From the signing of the Constitution to the eve of the Civil War there
persisted the belief that slaveholding southerners held the reins of the
American national government and used their power to ensure the
extension of slavery. Later termed the Slave Power theory, this idea
was no mere figment of a lunatic fringe’s imagination. It was, as
Leonard L. Richards shows in this innovative reexamination of the
Slave Power, endorsed at midcentury by such eminent and
circumspect men as Abraham Lincoln, William Henry Seward,
Charles Sumner, the editors and owners of the New York Times and
the Atlantic Monthly, and the president of Harvard College. With
The Slave Power, Richards reopens a discussion effectively closed
by historians since the 1920s—when the Slave Power theory was
dismissed as a distortion of reality, and later a manifestation of the
“paranoid style” in the early Republic—and attempts to understand
why such reputable leaders accepted this thesis wholeheartedly as
truth and why hundreds of thousands of voters responded to their
call to arms.

Through incisive biographical cameos and narrative vignettes,
Richards explains the evolution of the Slave Power argument over
time, tracing the oft-repeated scenario of northern outcry against the
perceived slaveocracy, followed by still another “victory” for the
South: the three-fifths rule in Congressional representation;
admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1820; the Indian removal of
1830; Texas in 1845; the Wilmot Proviso of 1847; the Fugitive Slave
Law of 1850; and more. Richards probes inter- and intraparty
strategies of the Democrats, Free Soilers, Whigs, and Republicans
and revisits national debates over sectional conflicts to elucidate just
how the southern Democratic slaveholders—with the help of some
northerners—assumed, protected, and eventually lost a dominance
that extended from the White House to the Speaker’s chair to the
Supreme Court.

The Slave Power reveals in a lucid and compelling way the
importance of slavery in the structure of national politics from the
earliest moments of the federal Union through the emergence of the
Republican Party. Extraordinary in its research and interpretation, it
will challenge and edify all readers of American history.


Leonard Richards is professor of history at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. He received the American Historical
Association’s Beveridge Prize for “Gentlemen of Property and
Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America. He is also
the author of The Advent of American Democracy and The Life and
Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams, a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize.


208 pages, 6 x 9
11 charts, 3 maps, 5 halftones
ISBN 0-8071-2537-7 (cl),
$39.95s
ISBN 0-8071-2600-4 (p),
$19.95s

Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1699-1860
Computerized Information from Original Manuscript Sources

Edited by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall


In this extraordinary research tool, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has created and
edited a collection of well over 100,000 records from countless civil
documents, manuscripts, and published censuses to provide an unprecedented
look into the lives of Africans and peoples of African descent in Louisiana – as
well as of their owners and freers – from earliest colonial times through 1860.

This compact disk will be an essential research instrument and teaching tool
for genealogists as well as for scholars and students in many fields, including
Atlantic slave trade history, historical demography, economic history,
Louisiana and Gulf South history, African and African Diaspora Studies,
creole linguistics, and anthropology.

About the Databases:
The centerpiece of the disc is Hall's Louisiana Slave Database, 1719-1820, a
monumental collection of more than 100,000 records and 114 fields entered
almost entirely from original manuscript sources written in French, Spanish,
and English discovered in archives in Louisiana, Texas, France, and Spain.

The records can be accessed by field or any combination of fields, for example,
searching for a particular slave by name and name of master. Other fields
include parish, year, type of document, gender, birthplace – including about
10,000 records indicating African ethnicity – racial designation, age, family
relationships, prices, skills, illnesses, slave trade ship on which the slave
arrived, deceased masters, as well as sellers and buyers. There are more than
600 records involving court testimony by slaves and over 1,000 records
involving runaway slaves, conspiracies, and rebellions. Exact document
retrieval information is included in each record.

Other Databases on the CD-ROM include:

Louisiana Free Database, 1720-1820: includes records concerning more than
4,000 slaves found in documents involving manumissions, including names and
descriptions of the slaves, family relationships, names of masters, names and
descriptions of freers in cases when they were purchased from their masters in
order to free them. There are fields indicating the reasons for manumission,
conditional manumissions, means of manumission, the relationship between
freer and freed, and prices paid for them. About 25% of these manumission
documents involved rural parishes and the rest Orleans Parish. Hall also
provides a database created from the rare, and unusually rich original
manuscript census of New Orleans in 1778 which is housed in the Archivo
Général de Indias in Seville.

Paul Lachance's Database: a compilation of Louisiana censuses from 1699
through 1860.

Virginia and Jeffrey Gould's Databases: provides various New Orleans,
Pensacola, and Mobile censuses from 1784 to1850.

Image files: includes a map of Louisiana dating from 1825, a map of Africa
locating the eighteen most frequent ethnicities sent to Louisiana, scanned
copies of some rare, original manuscript documents, and samples of graphs
created from the Hall databases.

Technical Information:
Formatted to be used in either a DOS or Windows environment, it is readable
on personal computers with reasonable speed, memory, and a compact disk
drive. The data can be opened with good quality database or spreadsheet
software including such programs as Microsoft Access, Paradox, Oracle,
Dbase, Lotus Approach, and Lotus 1,2,3, as well as Corel Quattro Pro and
Microsoft Excel. Calculations can be made on SPSS for Windows or any other
good statistical software. SPSS data and syntax files are provided for the Hall
databases.

The CD-ROM is designed to open automatically once placed in a CD drive. If
your computer does not respond to Autoplay programming, the CD may be
opened manually through Windows Explorer or "My Computer" (Windows
95); through Program Manager (Windows 3.1); or by opening your database
software and reloading the data from the DBASE.DBF files on the CD.

A main menu for Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and
Genealogy provides links to the major parts of the CD. The eight categories
link to appropriate icons for each separate collection or for general
information, maps, and documents.

Please send any questions of comments about her databases to Gwendolyn
Midlo Hall ghall1929@aol.com. For questions about his census tables and
spreadsheets, contact Paul Lachance lachance1943@home.com.


******************************************************

This CD-ROM is partially a result of a project funded by the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Ministries of Culture of France and Spain,
the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Louisiana Endowment for the
Humanities, the Historic New Orleans Collection, Northeastern University,
Rutgers University, and the University of New Orleans: Gwendolyn Midlo
Hall and Patrick Manning, co-investigators.

January 27, 2002