Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction
Subtitle: From Faulkner to Morrison
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: April 29, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9781403983879
Subjects: American - African American; American - African American & Black; American - General; Literary Criticism & Collections / African-American & Black; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; 20th century; American fiction; History and criticism; Southern States; Whites in literature
Description: "Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction explores a form of racial passing that has gone largely unnoticed. Duvall makes visible the means by which southern novelists repeatedly imagined their white characters as fundamentally black in some sense. Beginning with William Faulkner, Duvall traces a form of figurative and rhetorical masking in twentieth-century southern fiction that derives from whiteface minstrelsy. In the fiction of such subsequent writers as Flannery O'Connor, John Barth, Dorothy Allison, and Ishmael Reed, the reader sees characters who present a whiteface to the world, even as they unconsciously perform cultural blackness. These queer performances of race repeatedly reveal that being merely Caucasian is insufficient to claim Southern Whiteness."--Jacket.