The new southern studies has had an uneasy relationship with both American studies and the old southern studies. In Finding Purple America, Jon Smith, one of the founders of the new movement, locates the source of that unease in the fundamentally antimodern fantasies of both older fields. The old southern studies tends to view modernity as a threat to a mystic southern essence—a dangerous outside force taking the form of everything from a "bulldozer revolution" to a "national project of forgetting." Since the rise of the New Americanists, American studies has also imagined itself to be in a permanent crisis mode, seeking to affiliate the field and the national essence with youth countercultures that sixties leftists once imagined to be "the future." Such fantasies, Smith argues, have resulted in an old southern studies that cannot understand places like Birmingham or Atlanta (or cities at all) and an American studies that cannot understand red states. Most Americans live in neither a comforting, premodern Mayberry nor an exciting, postmodern Los Angeles but rather in what postcolonialists call "alternative modernities" and "hybrid cultures" whose relationships to past and future, to stability and change, are complex and ambivalent. Looking at how "the South" has played in global metropolitan pop culture since the nineties and at how southern popular and high culture alike have, in fact, repeatedly embraced urban modernity, Smith masterfully weaves together postcolonial theory, cultural studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and, surprisingly, marketing theory to open up the inconveniently in-between purple spaces and places that Americanist and southernist fantasies about "who we are"have so long sought to foreclose.

The new southern studies has had an uneasy relationship with both American studies and the old southern studies. In Finding Purple America, Jon Smith, one of the founders of the new movement, locates the source of that unease in the fundamentally antimodern fantasies of both older fields. The old southern studies tends to view modernity as a threat to a mystic southern essence--a dangerous outside force taking the form of everything from a "bulldozer revolution" to a "national project of forgetting." Since the rise of the New Americanists, American studies has also imagined itself to be in a permanent crisis mode, seeking to affiliate the field and the national essence with youth countercultures that sixties leftists once imagined to be "the future." Such fantasies, Smith argues, have resulted in an old southern studies that cannot understand places like Birmingham or Atlanta (or cities at all) and an American studies that cannot understand red states. Most Americans live in neither a comforting, premodern Mayberry nor an exciting, postmodern Los Angeles but rather in what postcolonialists call "alternative modernities" and "hybrid cultures" whose relationships to past and future, to stability and change, are complex and ambivalent. Looking at how "the South" has played in global metropolitan pop culture since the nineties and at how southern popular and high culture alike have, in fact, repeatedly embraced urban modernity, Smith masterfully weaves together postcolonial theory, cultural studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and, surprisingly, marketing theory to open up the inconveniently in-between purple spaces and places that Americanist and southernist fantasies about "who we are"have so long sought to foreclose.

A son is tasked with an impossible decision in this poignant, astutely observed portrait of a family in crisis from the author of The Ice Storm While visiting his mother, Billie, who suffers from a degenerative neurological disease that has left her paralyzed and unable to speak, Dexter “Hex” Raitliffe learns that his stepfather, Billie’s husband and caretaker, has left her. Alone and incapable of living on her own, Billie makes an unfathomable request of Hex: to assist her in committing suicide. Perpetually indecisive, paralyzed by self-doubt, and hindered by an unshakable stutter, Hex sets out to confront his stepfather, only to find himself facing off against his own struggles—with intimacy and alcoholism—along the way. Back in the suburbs of his youth, Hex experiences the lull of nostalgia as well as the sting of painful memories like his father’s death as he tries to reconcile his mother’s fate and his own wavering identity. Author Rick Moody evokes this singular setting with stunning clarity. Profoundly tragic yet punctuated by moments of hilarity, Purple America is a searing gaze into one family’s fragile, chaotic heart. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Rick Moody including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

As America rushes headlong into a dramatic campaign season, it is clear that these consequential contests—and the ones that follow—will be hugely influenced by recent changes in the nation's makeup. Red, Blue, and Purple America provides a clear and nuanced understanding of the geographic and demographic changes that are transforming the United States and how that transformation is reshaping politics, for the 2008 elections and beyond. The invaluable result is a detailed picture of current trends as well as a clear-eyed assessment of how they will shape American politics and policy during the next two decades. An elite group of demographers, geographers, and political scientists analyze rapidly changing patterns of immigration, settlement, demography, family structure, and religion. Each analysis describes one major trend and assesses its likely impact on politics, for the 2008 elections but for the long term as well. The authors then lay out the most likely implications for public policy. In doing so, they show how these trends have shaped the Red and Blue divisions we are familiar with today, and how the developments might break apart those blocs in new and surprising ways.

This book explores how an eclectic selection of narratives and images of the American South have been developed and disseminated. The contributors emphasize how ideas of “the South” have real social, political, and economic ramifications, and that they register at various local, regional, national, and transnational scales.

The South is often perceived as a haunted place in its region's literature, one that is strange, deviant, or "queer." The peculiar, often sexually charged literary worlds of contemporary writers like Fannie Flagg, Monique Truong, and Randall Kenan speak to this connection between queerness and the South. Heidi Siegrist explores the boundaries of negotiating place and sexuality by using the concept of Southernness—a purposefully fluid idea of the South that extends beyond simple geography, eschewing familiar ideas of the Southern canon. When the connection between queerness and Southerness becomes apparent, Siegrist shows a Southern-branded queer deviance can not only change the way we think about literature but can also change Southern queer people's lived experiences. Siegrist gathers a bevy of undertheorized writers, from Kenan and Truong to Dorothy Allison and even George R. R. Martin, showing that there are many "queer Souths." Siegrist offers these multiverses as a way to appreciate a place that is often unfriendly, even deadly, to queer people. But as Siegrist argues, none of these Souths, from the terrestrial to the imaginary, would be what they are without the influence and power of queer literature.

The Dirty South examines the shifting significances of the South as a constructed, fantasized region in the American psyche, particularly its frequent association with tropes of dirt that emphasize soil, garbage, trash, grit, litter, mud, swamp water, slime, and pollution. Beginning with iconic works from the 1970s such as Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, James A. Crank traces the image of a “dirty” South into the twenty-first century to explore the social, political, and psychological effects of the region’s hold on the imaginations of southerners and nonsoutherners alike. With a focus on media forms through which southern identity gets articulated and questioned—including horror movies, Swamp Thing comics, and popular music by artists such as Waylon Jennings and OutKast—The Dirty South probes the sustained fascination with southern dirtiness while reflecting on its causes and consequences since the end of the civil rights era. Highlighting the period from 1970 to 2020, during which the South began to represent several new possible identities for the nation as a whole and for the area itself, Crank considers the ways that southerners have used depictions of dirt to create and police boundaries and to contest those boundaries. Each chapter pairs prominent literary or cultural texts from the 1970s with more contemporary works, such as Jordan Peele’s film Get Out, which recycle similar investments or, critically, challenge the inherent whiteness of the earlier images. By historicizing fantasies of the region and connecting them to the first decades of the twenty-first century, The Dirty South reveals that notions about southern dirtiness proliferate not because they lend authenticity or relevancy to the U.S. South, but because they aid so conspicuously in the zombified work of tethering investors (real and imagined) to a graveyard of ideas.

During the Cold War, national discourse strove for unity through patriotism and political moderation to face a common enemy. Some authors and intellectuals supported that narrative by casting America’s complicated history with race and poverty as moral rather than merely political problems. Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America examines southern literature and the culture within the United States from the period just before the Cold War through the civil rights movement to show how this literature won a significant place in Cold War culture and shaped the nation through the time of Hillbilly Elegy. Tackling cultural issues in the country through subtext and metaphor, the works of authors like William Faulkner, Lillian Smith, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Walker Percy redefined “South” as much more than a geographical identity within an empire. The “South” has become a racially coded sociopolitical and cultural identity associated with white populist conservatism that breaks geographical boundaries and, as it has in the past, continues to have a disproportionate influence on the nation’s future and values.

Explores the abundance of Native American representations in US Southern literature.

A new critical companion to the Gothic traditions of American CultureThis new Companion surveys the traditions and conventions of the dark side of American culture its repressed memories, its anxieties and panics, its fears and horrors, its obsessions and paranoias. Featuring new critical essays by established and emerging academics from a range of national backgrounds, this collection offers new discussions and analyses of canonical and lesser-known texts in literature and film, television, photography, and video games. Its scope ranges from the earliest manifestations of American Gothic traditions in frontier narratives and colonial myths, to its recent responses to contemporary global events. Key Features Features original critical writing by established and emerging scholarsSurveys the full range of American Gothic, from its earliest texts to 21st Century worksIncludes critical analyses of American Gothic in new media and technologiesWill establish new benchmarks for the critical understanding of American Gothic traditions