Writing On The Southern Front

For traditionalists, the conservative ascendency of the 1980s turned out to be a major disappointment. With the triumph of multiculturalism and political correctness, liberalism seemed to move from strength to strength. Still, a stout number of southern conservative writers plunged forward, and their themes of populism, immigration, and cultural integrity are seeing a contemporary resurgence. Discussing a wide array of authors who worked in a variety of genres, Joseph Scotchie celebrates those unreconstructed champions who fought the culture wars of their times with a special learning and vigor. Also included in this collection are creative artists who kept the flame of literature alive, providing visions of possibilities that only genre can provide.

For traditionalists, the conservative ascendency of the 1980s turned out to be a major disappointment. With the triumph of multiculturalism and political correctness, liberalism seemed to move from strength to strength. Still, a stout number of southern conservative writers plunged forward, and their themes of populism, immigration, and cultural integrity are seeing a contemporary resurgence. Discussing a wide array of authors who worked in a variety of genres, Joseph Scotchie celebrates those unreconstructed champions who fought the culture wars of their times with a special learning and vigor. Also included in this collection are creative artists who kept the flame of literature alive, providing visions of possibilities that only genre can provide.

Contributions by Julie Cantrell, Katherine Clark, Susan Cushman, Jim Dees, Clyde Edgerton, W. Ralph Eubanks, John M. Floyd, Joe Formichella, Patti Callahan Henry, Jennifer Horne, Ravi Howard, Suzanne Hudson, River Jordan, Harrison Scott Key, Cassandra King, Alan Lightman, Sonja Livingston, Corey Mesler, Niles Reddick, Wendy Reed, Nicole Seitz, Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, Sally Palmer Thomason, Jacqueline Allen Trimble, M. O. Walsh, and Claude Wilkinson The South is often misunderstood on the national stage, characterized by its struggles with poverty, education, and racism, yet the region has yielded an abundance of undeniably great literature. In Southern Writers on Writing, Susan Cushman collects twenty-six writers from across the South whose work celebrates southern culture and shapes the landscape of contemporary southern literature. Contributors hail from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida. Contributors such as Lee Smith, Michael Farris Smith, W. Ralph Eubanks, and Harrison Scott Key, among others, explore issues like race, politics, and family and the apex of those issues colliding. It discusses landscapes, voices in the South, and how writers write. The anthology is divided into six sections, including "Becoming a Writer"; "Becoming a Southern Writer"; "Place, Politics, People"; "Writing about Race"; "The Craft of Writing"; and "A Little Help from My Friends."

A rediscovered World War I masterpiece—one of the few memoirs about the Italian front—for fans of military history and All Quiet on the Western Front An infantryman’s “harrowing, moving, [and] occasionally comic” account of trench warfare on the alpine front seen in A Farewell to Arms (Times Literary Supplement). Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JŸnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu’s memoir as an infantryman is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals in spare and detached prose the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army on the Asiago plateau in northeastern Italy—the alpine front so poignantly evoked by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. For Lussu, June 1916 to July 1917 was a year of continuous assaults on impregnable trenches, absurd missions concocted by commanders full of patriotic rhetoric and vanity but lacking in tactical skill, and episodes often tragic and sometimes grotesque, where the incompetence of his own side was as dangerous as the attacks waged by the enemy. A rare firsthand account of the Italian front, Lussu’s memoir succeeds in staging a fierce indictment of the futility of war in a dry, often ironic style that sets his tale wholly apart from the Western Front of Remarque and adds an astonishingly modern voice to the literature of the Great War.

When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, Vasily Grossman became a special correspondent for the Red Star, the Soviet Army's newspaper, and reported from the frontlines of the war. A Writer at War depicts in vivid detail the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front, and the lives and deaths of soldiers and civilians alike. Witnessing some of the most savage fighting of the war, Grossman saw firsthand the repeated early defeats of the Red Army, the brutal street fighting in Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk (the largest tank engagement in history), the defense of Moscow, the battles in Ukraine, the atrocities at Treblinka, and much more. Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova have taken Grossman's raw notebooks, and fashioned them into a gripping narrative providing one of the most even-handed descriptions --at once unflinching and sensitive -- we have ever had of what Grossman called “the ruthless truth of war.”

This book offers an innovative interdisciplinary perspective in the study of Roberto Saviano as a media/literary phenomenon. It includes a thorough analysis of Saviano’s public personality and production with accurate references to key semiotic and cultural studies notions such as body, agency, audience, empowerment.

The bibliography volume of the three-volume East Looks West: East European Travel Writing in Europe collates travel writing published in book form by east Europeans travelling in Europe from ca. 1550 to 2000. It is intended as a fundamental research tool, collecting together travel writings within each national/linguistic tradition, and enabling comparative analysis of such material. It fills an important gap in the existing reference literature, both in western and east European languages, and will be of use to those working in the growing fields of comparative travel writing, regional and national identities, and postcolonialism.These texts exist in surprisingly large numbers, and include writings of high literary quality as well as of historical interest, but they have been relatively little studied as a genre. Much of this material is rare and difficult to find, even in national libraries. As a result, there are few bibliographical surveys of the literature of east European travel and self-representation, and none that are region-wide or comparative in scope. This is the third volume of a three-part set of East Looks West, Vol. 1 - An Anthology of East European Travel Writing on Europe; and Vol. 2 - A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe.

Russia's experiences during the Civil War determined the framework within which the Russian people were governed throughout the Soviet period. These newly released documents reveal how the events of 1918-22 reflected struggles and tensions in Russian society that were more complex than the simple Red-White propaganda war. In this collection the authors have sought out documents which highlight the complexities of the struggle, exploring episodes which shed light on what was a multifaceted struggle which left wounds on Russian society which never healed.