Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction

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.

subjects: Literature and society,  Intellectual life,  Ethnicity in literature,  History and criticism,  Race relations in literature,  American fiction,  Whites in literature,  Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature,  Relations interethniques,  Stereotyper i litteraturen,  Amerikansk litteratur,  Ethnische Beziehungen,  Literatur,  Dans la littérature,  Race,  Rasrelationer i litteraturen,  Roman américain,  Histoire et critique,  Rassenbeziehung <Motiv>,  Historia,  Südstaaten,  Ethnische Identität,  American fiction, history and criticism, 20th century,  Southern states, intellectual life,  White people in literature,  LITERARY CRITICISM,  American,  General,  Literary essays,  Literary theory,  Literature