Research Catalog

Title

Reading Reconstruction : Sherwood Bonner and the literature of the post-Civil War South / Kathryn B. McKee.

Author

McKee, Kathryn B.

Publication

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2019]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 354 pages; 24 cm.

Summary

"Kathryn B. McKee's Reading Reconstruction situates the Mississippi writer Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849-1883) as an important cultural observer of the 1870s and 1880s who channeled into her fiction and nonfiction the discord and uneasiness of the Reconstruction era. In works like the novel Like unto Like--as well as her regional stories and travel writing--Bonner engaged questions about shifting definitions of citizenship, questioned the evolving rhetoric of postwar reconciliation, and embraced the disruptive potential of humor to unsettle conventional domestic scenarios and gender roles. McKee shows how Bonner's works rehearsed the roles expected of white southern women, both at home and abroad, while also presenting characters who knowingly violate those norms and then confront the consequences of their actions. Her fiction also routinely undermined the social prerogatives of manhood and whiteness by inventing landscapes in which they exercised limited power. But despite these overt challenges to the period's dominant narratives, Bonner's writing frequently retreated to the familiar, comfortable ground of racial supremacy, if not patriarchy, before situations veered in the direction of lasting change. By contextualizing the work of an astute social commentator from the post-Civil War South, Reading Reconstruction offers a long overdue reassessment of Sherwood Bonner's place in American literary history by challenging traditional readings of postbellum southern literature"--

Series Statement

Southern literary studies

Uniform Title

Southern literary studies.

Subjects

• Reconstruction (United States : 1865-1877) in literature
• Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877) in literature
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• McDowell, Katherine Sherwood Bonner, 1849-1883 > Criticism and interpretation

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: Making Sense of Sherwood Bonner -- "Safe in the Hands of the White People of Mississippi": Reconstruction in Bonner's Holly Springs -- "Mississippi and Massachusetts Are a Long Way Apart": Sherwood Domestic Travel Letters -- "I Have Done My Sightseeing after a Fashion of My Own": Sherwood Bonner and the Geography of European Desire -- "I . . . Can Only Guess at What the Future Holds": Spectres of Instability in Bonner's Like unto Like -- "But I Draw a Veil": Reading Beneath the Surface of Bonner's Short Fiction -- Epilogue: Opening the Gateway Back to Bonner's World.

Call Number

JFE 19-3931

ISBN

• 9780807169957
• 0807169951
• 9780807170526 (canceled/invalid)
• 9780807170618 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

• 2018019076
• 40028784231

OCLC

1033574730

Author

McKee, Kathryn B., author.

Title

Reading Reconstruction : Sherwood Bonner and the literature of the post-Civil War South / Kathryn B. McKee.

Publisher

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2019]

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Southern literary studies

Southern literary studies.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Standard Identifier

40028784231

Research Call Number

JFE 19-3931