The Language Of The American South

In this volume Cleanth Brooks pays tribute to the language and literature of the American South. He writes of the language's unique syntax and its celebrated languorous rhythms; of the classical allusions and Addisonian locutions once favored by the gentry; and of the more earthbound eloquence, rooted in the dialect of England's southern lowlands, that is still heard in the speech of the region's plain folk. It is this rich spoken language, Brooks suggests, that has always been the life blood of southern writing. The strong tradition of storytelling in the South is reflected in the tales told by Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus and in the obsessive retellings that structure William Faulkner's novels and stories. But even more crucially, the language of the South--firmly rooted in the land but with a tendency to reach for the heavens above--has shaped the literary concerns and molded the complex visions to be found in the poetry of Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom; the stories of Flannery O'Connor, Peter Taylor, and Eudora Welty; and the novels of Warren, Allen Tate, and Walker Percy.

Top linguists from diverse fields address language varieties in the South. Language Variety in the South Revisited is a comprehensive collection of new research on southern United States English by foremost scholars of regional language variation. Like its predecessor, Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White (The University of Alabama Press, 1986), this book includes current research into African American vernacular English, but it greatly expands the scope of investigation and offers an extensive assessment of the field. The volume encompasses studies of contact involving African and European languages; analysis of discourse, pragmatic, lexical, phonological, and syntactic features; and evaluations of methods of collecting and examining data. The 38 essays not only offer a wealth of information about southern language varieties but also serve as models for regional linguistic investigation.

In terms of its linguistic and cultural make-up, the continent of South America provides linguists and anthropologists with a complex puzzle of language diversity. The continent teems with small language families and isolates, and even languages spoken in adjacent areas can be typologically vastly different from each other. This volume intends to provide a taste of the linguistic diversity found in South America within the area of clause subordination. The potential variety in the strategies that languages can use to encode subordinate events is enormous, yet there are clearly dominant patterns to be discerned: switch reference marking, clause chaining, nominalization, and verb serialization. The book also contributes to the continuing debate on the nature of syntactic complexity, as evidenced in subordination.

In the antebellum Natchez district, in the heart of slave country, black people sued white people in all-white courtrooms. They sued to enforce the terms of their contracts, recover unpaid debts, recuperate back wages, and claim damages for assault. They sued in conflicts over property and personal status. And they often won. Based on new research conducted in courthouse basements and storage sheds in rural Mississippi and Louisiana, Kimberly Welch draws on over 1,000 examples of free and enslaved black litigants who used the courts to protect their interests and reconfigure their place in a tense society. To understand their success, Welch argues that we must understand the language that they used--the language of property, in particular--to make their claims recognizable and persuasive to others and to link their status as owner to the ideal of a free, autonomous citizen. In telling their stories, Welch reveals a previously unknown world of black legal activity, one that is consequential for understanding the long history of race, rights, and civic inclusion in America.

The Routledge History of the American South looks at the major themes that have developed in the interdisciplinary field of Southern Studies. With fifteen original essays from experts in their respective fields, the handbook addresses such diverse topics as southern linguistics, music (secular and non-secular), gender, food, and history and memory. The chapters present focused historiographical analyses that, taken together, offer a clear sense of the evolution and contours of Southern Studies. This volume is valuable both as a dynamic introduction to Southern Studies and as an entry point into more recent research for those already familiar with the subfield.

"A great achievement. It is hard to imagine anyone matching it for depth, scope and subtlety of analysis as a whole or in its parts. --

Originally published in 1979. The idea of the "South" has its roots in Romanticism and American culture of the nineteenth century. This study by Michael O'Brien analyzes how the idea of a unique Southern consciousness endured into the twentieth century and how it affected the lives of prominent white Southern intellectuals. Individual chapters treat Howard Odum, John Donald Wade, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Frank Owsley, and Donald Davidson. The chapters trace each man's growing need for the idea of the South—how each defined it and how far each was able to sustain the idea as an element of social analysis. The Idea of the American South moves the debate over Southern identity from speculative essays about the "central theme" of Southern history and, by implication, past the restricted perception that race relations are a sufficient key to understanding the history of Southern identity.

Highlights competing masculine values in slave communities and reveals how masculinity shaped resistance, accommodation, and survival.