Constructing the Self

Este volumen pretende mostrar cómo los sureños se han enfrentado a su puesto y se han construido a sí mismos. Los ensayos reunidos exploran las diferentes narrativas y estrategias personales que los autores sureños han empleado para canalizar el impulso autobiográfico y dar expresión artística a sus ansiedades, traumas y revelaciones, así como su relación con la región. Con la discusión de diferentes tipos de memorias, este volumen refleja no sólo la transformación que ha sufrido este subgénero desde el boom de los años 90, sino también su flexibilidad como una forma popular de escritura de vida.

This volume aims to show how southerners have faced their post and constructed a self. The essays in this volume explore the different personal narratives and strategies southern authors have employed to channel the autobiographical impulse and give artistic expression to their anxieties, traumas and revelations, as well as their relationship with the region. With the discussion of different types of memoirs, this volume reflects not only the transformation that this sub-genre has undergone since the 1990s boom but also its flexibility as a popular form of life-writing.

Contents
INTRODUCTION
The Enduring Impulse to Tell about the Self and the South. Carmen Rueda-Ramos and Susana Jiménez Placer
PART 1
SUBVERSIVE (RE)CREATIONS OF THE SELF—PAST AND PRESENT
‘My Story Is Better Than Yours’: The Changing Politics of and Motives for Composing Southern African American Life Narratives. Trudier Harris
Working a Lever: Booker T. Washington’s Autobiographies as Tools for Social Change. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.
PART 2
THE LEGACY OF RACE: RECONCILING SELVES
‘I Knew Then Who I Was’: Memory, Narrative, and Sense of Self in Autobiographies of the Jim Crow South. Jennifer Ritterhouse
Daily Encounters: The Coming of Age of Melton A. McLaurin. Elizabeth Hayes Turner
Life Writing in Poetry and Prose: Natasha Tretheway’s Personal and National Revelations. Pearl McHaney
Southern Autobiography Around the Table of Brotherhood: A Dream Deferred, a Dream Deceased, a Dream Destroyed, a Dream Dismissed? Ineke Bockting
PART 3
AUTHORS, NARRATORS AND FICTIONALIZED SELVES
Memoirs’ Characters: Writer, Narrator, Protagonist. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw
Faulkner and Autobiography in Fiction. Thomas L. McHaney
‘A Someone Somewhere’: Locating Richard Ford’s Southern Self in his Fiction and Non-Fiction. Gérald Préher
Self-Fashioning and Philippe Labro’s ‘Southern Memoir’. The Foreign Student. Nahem Yousaf
PART 4
TRANSGRESSORS AND PERFORMERS OF SELF
Appalachian Women’s Autobiographies from the Margins: Crossing the Boundaries of the Genre. Carmen Rueda-Ramos
‘Pariahs for Flattering Reasons’: Confessions of Failed Southern Ladies on the Black Help. Susana Jiménez Placer
‘A Tarnished Lady?’: Tallulah Bankhead’s Southern Performance in Hollywood. Beata Zawadka
Grief and Humor: Appalachian Writers Using Autobiography to Find a Way Home. Sandra L. Ballard
PART 5
SITES FOR SELF-EXPLORATION: TRAVEL AND ILLNESS NARRATIVES
The Self Elsewhere: Alice Walker’s Identity in the Wider World. Jesús Varela-Zapata
Reflecting on the Region, Revisioning the Self: John Gould Fletcher’s Song of His Life and Its Transatlantic Context. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz
The Physicality of Reminiscence: The Stimuli of the South in Bobbie Ann Mason’s Clear Springs: A Memoir. Candela Delgado Marín
Coming to the End: The Perception of Mortality in the Autobiographical. Writings of Reynolds Price and Tim McLaurin. Marcel Arbeit
Contributors