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Holy Radishes!

Author : Roberto G. Fernàndez

Publisher : Arte Publico Press

Page : 308 pages

File Size : 27,39 MB

Release : 1995-06-30

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 9781611921755

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Book Description

A host of memorable and wacky characters populate this satire of Cuban immigrant life. Lisander, the poet laureate, trades the golden laurel crown of yesteryear for a career as a rock musician. Dina, once the squirrel-costumed prostitute of MarinaÍs zoological luxury brothel, is now the mistress of the radish processing plant. Nelson goes nuts for the squirrel and Bernab? poses as a Nazi concentration camp survivor. The civic leaders who resort to the wilderness of Lake Okeechobess spend their days planning the liberation of their homeland while their wives toil in the radish plant and find consolidation in their shared memories of the Xawa Ladies Tennis Club and their canasta parties. While Holy Radishes is a parable of the Cuban immigrant community, it is, foremost, the story of Nelly Pardo, a dreamer who envisions herself in the paradise called Mondovi, where she has an intimate relationship with Rigoletto, her truffle-loving pet pig. And it is to fulfill her dreams for a better world that she will team up with redneck ex-cheerleader Mrs. James B. III who fabricates a mythical antebellum past to rival that of the immigrants. This unlikely alliance reflects the capacity of women to endure, survive, and overcome.



Southern Writers

Author : Joseph M. Flora

Publisher : LSU Press

Page : 498 pages

File Size : 48,82 MB

Release : 2006-06-21

Category : Reference

ISBN : 0807131237

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Book Description

This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.



Possessing the Past

Author : Lisa Hinrichsen

Publisher : LSU Press

Page : 357 pages

File Size : 50,66 MB

Release : 2015-06-15

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0807160075

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Book Description

Employing recent theories of memory from multiple areas of study, Possessing the Past illuminates the tangled relationships among trauma, fantasy, and the public sphere, and their impact on the "South" in imagination and in reality. Focusing on the roles that narrative and fantasy play in creating a sense of regional distinctiveness, Lisa Hinrichsen brings a wealth of critical scholarship to her consideration of memory and southern literature. Hinrichsen's nuanced readings of a diverse group of southern authors, including William Faulkner, Roberto Fernández, Erna Brodber, Monique Truong, and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, offer new ways of conceptualizing memory, place, and history. She unravels southern literature's critical confrontation with the region's history through complex systems of remembrance and erasure, and she traces how fantasy mediates trauma and adjudicates identity. Expansive in its psychoanalytical approach, her work explores issues of law, testimony, and social justice; the role of nostalgic fantasies of gentility at midcentury; the relationship between white empathy and social fantasy; the resemblance of regional patterns of disavowal to national ideologies of forgetting in Vietnam-era fiction; and the impact of contemporary multicultural literature on memory and community. Possessing the Past broadens the theoretical framework used to conceptualize memory and trauma, while grounding traumatic testimony in the specifics of time and place amply offered by southern literature. It provides new readings of an array of southern writers and deepens our understanding of the continuing importance of history, memory, and fantasy in the literature of the U.S. South.



Cuban-American Fiction in English

Author : M. Delores Carlito

Publisher : Scarecrow Press

Page : 142 pages

File Size : 37,46 MB

Release : 2005

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 9780810856806

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Book Description

This bibliography contains listings and annotations of all novels, anthologies, and short story collections written by the first, 1.5, and second generations of Cuban Americans. This work also contains listings and annotations of all secondary works dealing with this fiction, as well as related memoirs, autobiographies and interviews.



Race Mixing

Author : Suzanne W. Jones

Publisher : JHU Press

Page : 366 pages

File Size : 11,13 MB

Release : 2006-02-15

Category : History

ISBN : 9780801883934

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Book Description

In the southern United States, there remains a deep need among both black and white writers to examine the topic of race relations, whether they grew up during segregation or belong to the younger generation that graduated from integrated schools. In Race Mixing, Suzanne Jones offers insightful and provocative readings of contemporary novels, the work of a wide range of writers—black and white, established and emerging. Their stories explore the possibilities of cross-racial friendships, examine the repressed history of interracial love, reimagine the Civil Rights era through children's eyes, herald the reemergence of the racially mixed character, investigate acts of racial violence, and interrogate both rural and urban racial dynamics. Employing a dynamic model of the relationship between text and context, Jones shows how more than thirty relevant writers—including Madison Smartt Bell, Larry Brown, Bebe Moore Campbell, Thulani Davis, Ellen Douglas, Ernest Gaines, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Reynolds Price, Alice Walker, and Tom Wolfe—illuminate the complexities of the color line and the problems in defining racial identity today. While an earlier generation of black and white southern writers challenged the mythic unity of southern communities in order to lay bare racial divisions, Jones finds in the novels of contemporary writers a challenge to the mythic sameness within racial communities—and a broader definition of community and identity. Closely reading these stories about race in America, Race Mixing ultimately points to new ways of thinking about race relations. "We need these fictions," Jones writes, "to help us imagine our way out of the social structures and mind-sets that mythologize the past, fragment individuals, prejudge people, and divide communities."



All-American Redneck

Author : Matthew J. Ferrence

Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press

Page : 209 pages

File Size : 10,10 MB

Release : 2014-03-30

Category : Literary Collections

ISBN : 162190007X

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Book Description

Examining the icon's foundations in James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo--'an ideal white man, free of the boundaries of civilization'--and the degraded rural poor of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, Matthew Ferrence shows how Redneck stereotypes were further extended in Deliverance, both the novel and the film, and in a popular cycle of movies starring Burt Reynolds in the 1970s and '80s, among other manifestations. As a contemporary cultural figure, the author argues, the Redneck represents no one in particular but offers a model of behavior and ideals for many. Most important, it has become a tool--reductive, confining, and (sometimes, almost) liberating--by which elite forces gather and maintain social and economic power. Those defying its boundaries, as the Dixie Chicks did when they criticized President Bush and the Iraq invasion, have done so at their own peril.



American Fiction of the 1990s

Author : Jay Prosser

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 257 pages

File Size : 38,1 MB

Release : 2016-04-01

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1134077467

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Book Description

American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture brings together essays from international experts to examine one of the most vital and energized decades in American literature. This volume reads the rich body of 1990s American fiction in the context of key cultural concerns of the period. The issues that the contributors identify as especially productive include: Immigration and America’s geographical borders, particularly those with Latin America Racial tensions, race relations and racial exchanges Historical memory and the recording of history Sex, scandal and the politicization of sexuality Postmodern technologies, terrorism and paranoia American Fiction of the 1990s examines texts by established authors such as Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon, who write some of their most ambitious work in the period, but also by emergent writers, such as Sherman Alexie, Chang-Rae Lee, E. Annie Proulx, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Franzen. Offering new insight into both the literature and the culture of the period, as well as the interaction between the two in a way that furthers the New American Studies, this volume will be essential reading for students and lecturers of American literature and culture and late twentieth-century fiction. Contributors include: Timothy Aubry, Alex Blazer, Kasia Boddy, Stephen J. Burn, Andrew Dix, Brian Jarvis, Suzanne W. Jones, Peter Knight, A. Robert Lee, Stacey Olster, Derek Parker Royal, Krishna Sen, Zoe Trodd, Andrew Warnes and Nahem Yousaf.



Modern American Counter Writing

Author : A. Robert Lee

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 309 pages

File Size : 44,3 MB

Release : 2010-01-21

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1135161658

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Book Description

The dissident voice in US culture might almost be said to have been born with the territory. Its span runs from Roger Williams to Thoreau, Anne Bradstreet to Gertrude Stein, Ambrose Bierce to the New Journalism, The Beats to the recent Bad Subjects cyber-crowd. This new study analyses three recent literary tranches in the tradition: a re-envisioning of the whole Beat web or circuit; a consortium of postwar "outrider" voices – Hunter Thompson to Frank Chin, Joan Didion to Kathy Acker; and a latest purview of what, all too casually, has been designated "ethnic" writing. The aim is to set up and explore these different counter-seams of modern American writing, those which sit outside, or at least awkwardly within, agreed literary canons.



From Shadow to Presence

Author : Jelena Šesnic

Publisher : BRILL

Page : 285 pages

File Size : 33,46 MB

Release : 2007-01-01

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 9401204500

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Book Description

This volume departs from a more static concept of identity politics to engage the varied and entangled processes of ethnic/racial, national, and gender identifications in a range of contemporary US ethnic texts (from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s). Recognizing the growing salience of variously named ethnic, multicultural, and minority literatures as they are produced and circulated in the USA and worldwide nowadays, this work charts four broadly defined models of approaching such texts: cultural nationalism, ethnic feminism, borderlands and contact zones, and finally, the diasporic model. Drawing extensively on psychoanalytic theory, feminist/gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and its revision of ethnography, the book offers a fresh, engaged, theoretically, and analytically well-rehearsed overview of the distinctive and determining features of a rapidly expanding domain of contemporary US literary production, namely, ethnic literatures. Of potential interest to scholars of American/US literature, but also minority and postcolonial literatures, and to students of American literature, the book attempts an interethnic comparative approach to well- and lesser-known texts. Among the authors represented are Shawn Wong, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sherman Alexie, Denise Chávez, Rolando Hinojosa, Roberto Fernández and Edwidge Danticat.



Latino Almanac

Author : Nicolás Kanellos

Publisher : Visible Ink Press

Page : 1139 pages

File Size : 46,84 MB

Release : 2022-09-20

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1578597536

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Book Description

A celebration of people and pride! Explore the achievements and contributions of Latinos in the United States with this illuminating history. Latinos in the United States are a vibrant mix of people and multiple identities, each unique, varied, and accomplished. Beginning with the Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century, Latinos have been an important part of American society. They’ve fought the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and all wars in between and since, and in the last decade, their businesses have grown at twice the pace of the overall U.S. economy. The most complete and affordable single-volume reference on Latino history available today, Latino Almanac: From Columbus to Corporate America honors the history and the impact of Latinos on the United States. This hefty tome is a fascinating mix of biographies, little-known or misunderstood historical facts, and enlightening essays on significant legislation, movements, current issues, and achievements across a variety of fields, including business, labor, politics, the military, music, sports, law, media, religion, art, literature, theater, film, science, technology, and medicine. A large collection of 650 biographies includes both celebrated and lesser-known Latino stars, such as Dolores Fernández Huerta, labor leader Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court justice Juan Felipe Herrera, U.S. poet laureate Roberto C. Goizueta, businessperson, former CEO of Coca-Cola Selena Gómez, actor, singer, producer Rebecca Lobo, basketball player, sports analyst Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. congressperson Ellen Ochoa, astronaut, engineer Anthony R. Jiménez, entrepreneur María Hinojosa, journalist Dennis Chávez, U.S. senator Oscar Muñoz, businessperson, CEO United Airlines Antonia Novello, surgeon general of the United States Geraldo Miguel Rivera, journalist Lin-Manuel Miranda, playwright, actor, director Alex Rodríguez, baseball player Rodolfo Anaya, novelist Desi Arnaz, television producer, actor, singer Jessica Mendoza, sportscaster, softball player Nydia Velásquez, U.S. congressperson Edward James Olmos, actor Marco Rubio, U.S. senator Rita Moreno, actor, dancer César Chávez, labor leader Marcelo Claure, businessperson, former Sprint CEO Ariel Dorfman, playwright, novelist Miriam Colón, actress, theater owner, producer Joaquín Castro, chair of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus And many, many more! While Latinos are among both the original and newest immigrants, today the majority of U.S. Latinos were born here and most speak English—although most are bilingual to one degree or another. Their influence on the economy and culture continues to increase. Their impact on the United States has been wide-ranging. Salsa has even overtaken ketchup to become the most popular condiment in the United States! Devoted to illustrating the moving and often lost history of Latinos in America, Latino Almanac is a unique and valuable resource. Numerous photographs and illustrations, a helpful bibliography, a timeline, and an extensive index add to its usefulness. Commemorating and honoring Latino achievements, honors, and influence, this important book brings to light all there is to admire and discover about Latino Americans!