Includes bibliographical references (pages 301-312) and index.
Cover; Contents; Prologue; Chapter One Southern Women Writers: A Confederacy of Water Moccasins; Chapter Two Dynamiting the Rails: Desegregating Southern Literary Studies; Chapter Three "And Every Baby ... Was Floating Round in the Water, Drowned": Throwaway Bodies in Southern Fiction; Chapter Four Race and the Cloud of Unknowing; Chapter Five Beyond the Hummingbird: Southern Gargantuas; Chapter Six Politics in the Kitchen: Roosevelt, McCullers, and Surrealist History; Chapter Seven White Objects, Black Ownership: Object Politics in Southern Fiction; Chapter Eight The Body as Testimony
Chapter Nine Studying the Wafflehouse Chain, or Dirt as Desire in Their Eyes Were Watching GodNotes; References; Index
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The story of southern writing--the Dixie Limited, if you will--runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture. For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and.