Martyn Bone

"Description: Since the publication of her first novel in 2008, Jesmyn Ward has established herself as arguably the most important U.S. author of the twenty-first century. The Writings of Jesmyn Ward is the first monograph focused on Ward's writing, and considers the full range of her career so far. Bone devotes a chapter each to Ward's first three novels-two of which, Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing, won the National Book Award for Fiction-and a further chapter to Ward's widely acclaimed memoir, Men We Reaped. The introduction and epilogue provide an overview of Ward's oeuvre that encompasses her essays (which explore key social issues from the Obama and Trump presidencies) as well as her most recent novel, Let Us Descend. The Writings of Jesmyn Ward also focuses on five key themes running throughout Ward's writing: black life in the U.S. South; the legacies of slavery and segregation, and racism's endurance in the twenty-first century; neoliberalism as the contemporary form of capitalism; environmental crisis in the Anthropocene; and human-animal relations. Bone also connects Ward's work to major figures in the U.S. literary canon, especially William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison. The Writings of Jesmyn Ward will be of particular interest to readers of American literature (especially African American literature and U.S. southern literature), environmental literature, and life writing. The book will also appeal to readers interested in the U.S. South, African American studies, race relations, the environmental humanities, and animal studies"--

Matters of Black Southern Life and Death

The Writings of Jesmyn Ward

Brian Ward

William A. Link

Most of the research on the South ties the region to the North, emphasizing racial binaries and outdated geographical boundaries, but The American South and the Atlantic World seeks a larger context. Helping to define “New” Southern studies, this book?the first of its kind?explores how the cultures, contacts, and economies of the Atlantic World shaped the South.

The American South and the Atlantic World

The Book Merchant

Book Merchant Staff

A career-spanning examination of a masterful fiction writer�s output

Perspectives on Barry Hannah

For generations, southern novelists and critics have grappled with a concept that is widely seen as a trademark of their literature: a strong attachment to geography, or a "sense of place." In the 1930s, the Agrarians accorded special meaning to rural life, particularly the farm, in their definitions of southern identity. For them, the South seemed an organic and rooted region in contrast to the North, where real estate development and urban sprawl evoked a faceless, raw capitalism. By the end of the twentieth century, however, economic and social forces had converged to create a modernized South. How have writers responded to this phenomenon? Is there still a sense of place in the South, or perhaps a distinctly postsouthern sense of place? Martyn Bone innovatively draws upon postmodern thinking to consider the various perspectives that southern writers have brought to the concept of "place" and to look at its fate in a national and global context. He begins with a revisionist assessment of the Agrarians, who failed in their attempts to turn their proprietary ideal of the small farm into actual policy but whose broader rural aesthetic lived on in the work of neo-Agrarian writers, including William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. By the 1950s, adherence to this aesthetic was causing southern writers and critics to lose sight of the social reality of a changing South. Bone turns to more recent works that do respond to the impact of capitalist spatial development on the South -- and on the nation generally -- including that self-declared "international city" Atlanta. Close readings of novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Anne Rivers Siddons, Tom Wolfe, and Toni Cade Bambara illuminate evolving ideas about capital, land, labor, and class while introducing southern literary studies into wider debates around social, cultural, and literary geography. Bone concludes his remarkably rich book by considering works of Harry Crews and Barbara Kingsolver that suggest the southern sense of place may be not only post-Agrarian or postsouthern but also transnational.

The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction

Where the New World Is assesses how fiction published since 1980 has resituated the U.S. South globally and how earlier twentieth-century writing already had done so in ways traditional southern literary studies tended to ignore. Martyn Bone argues that this body of fiction has, over the course of some eighty years, challenged received readings and understandings of the U.S. South as a fixed place largely untouched by immigration (or even internal migration) and economic globalization. The writers discussed by Bone emphasize how migration and labor have reconfigured the region’s relation to the nation and a range of transnational scales: hemispheric (Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti), transatlantic/Black Atlantic (Denmark, England, Mauritania), and transpacific/global southern (Australia, China, Vietnam). Writers under consideration include Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, John Oliver Killens, Russell Banks, Erna Brodber, Cynthia Shearer, Ha Jin, Monique Truong, Lan Cao, Toni Morrison, Peter Matthiessen, Dave Eggers, and Laila Lalami. The book also seeks to resituate southern studies by drawing on theories of “scale” that originated in human geography. In this way, Bone also offers a new paradigm in which the U.S. South is thoroughly engaged with a range of other scales from the local to the global, making both literature about the region and southern studies itself truly transnational in scope.

Martyn Bone

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