Becoming Southern Writers

Becoming Southern Writers

Essays in Honor of Charles Joyner

  • Author: Burton, Orville Vernon; Prince, Jr., Eldred E.
  • Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
  • ISBN: 9781611176520
  • eISBN Pdf: 9781611176537
  • eISBN Epub: 9781611176537
  • Place of publication:  South Carolina , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2016
  • Month: May
  • Language: English

Southern writers, historians, and artists celebrate the life and career of a beloved mentor, friend, and colleague

Edited by southern historians Orville Vernon Burton and Eldred E. Prince, Jr., Becoming Southern Writers pays tribute to South Carolinian Charles Joyner's fifty year career as a southern historian, folklorist, and social activist. Exceptional writers of fact, fiction, and poetry, the contributors to the volume are among Joyner's many friends, admirers, and colleagues as well as those to whom Joyner has served as a mentor. The contributors describe how they came to write about the South and how they came to write about it in the way they do while reflecting on the humanistic tradition of scholarship as lived experience.

The contributors constitute a Who's Who of southern writers—from award-winning literary artists to historians. Freed from constraints of their disciplines by Joyner's example, they enthusiastically describe family reunions, involvement in the civil rights movement, research projects, and mentors. While not all contributors are native to the South or the United States and a few write about the South only occasionally, all the essayists root their work in southern history, and all have made distinguished contributions to southern writing. Diverse in theme and style, these writings represent each author's personal reflections on experiences living in and writing about the South while touching on topics that surfaced in Joyner's own works, such as race, family, culture, and place. Whether based on personal or historical events, each one speaks to Joyner's theme that "all history is local history, somewhere."

  • Cover
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Down by the Waterside: Family, Identity, and Maritime History
  • How Charles Joyner Changed My Life
  • Stranger Redux
  • Becoming a Southern Historian
  • About the South
  • It Wasn’t in the Plan
  • The Maryland Design: Toward the Cultural History of a Border State
  • Balance, Schlesinger, and Chaz Joyner
  • Southern History as Family History
  • Fiction, History, Murder, and the Book of Truth
  • Feeling Awful Southern . . . or Not?
  • Writing the South in Fact
  • Curing My Historical Schizophrenia
  • Down Home
  • Researching and Writing Southern History from Close Encounters
  • Memories
  • When Does a Microscope Become a Telescope or a Telescope a Microscope?
  • Shared Traditions
  • A New England Yankee Discovers Southern History
  • Recollections
  • A Personal Odyssey: Discovering Local History
  • The Philosophy Shop, Part I
  • The Philosophy Shop, Part II
  • A New Zealander Becomes a Southern Historian
  • Chaz Joyner at Coastal: Bargain or Burden?
  • The Soul Sings for Justice: Why I Write about the South
  • An Accidental Scholar
  • C. Vann Woodward and Me
  • Charles Joyner: A Photographic Homage
  • Publications
  • Index
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • D
    • E
    • F
    • G
    • H
    • I
    • J
    • K
    • L
    • M
    • N
    • O
    • P
    • Q
    • R
    • S
    • T
    • U
    • V
    • W
    • Z

Subjects

    SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER

    By subscribing, you accept our Privacy Policy