Saves time in preparing team activities and assessments Includes story synopsis, teaching suggestions, quiz, and answer key Note: The short stories are not included in this publication.

"Culture" is a term we commonly use to explain the differences in our ways of living. In this book Michael A. Elliott returns to the moment this usage was first articulated, tracing the concept of culture to the writings -- folktales, dialect literature, local color sketches, and ethnographies -- that provided its intellectual underpinnings in turn-of-the-century America. The Culture Concept explains how this now-familiar definition of "culture" emerged during the late nineteenth century through the intersection of two separate endeavors that shared a commitment to recording group-based difference -- American literary realism and scientific ethnography. Elliott looks at early works of cultural studies as diverse as the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt, the Ghost-Dance ethnography of James Mooney, and the prose narrative of the Omaha anthropologist-turned-author Francis La Flesche. His reading of these works -- which struggle to find appropriate theoretical and textual tools for articulating a less chauvinistic understanding of human difference -- is at once a recovery of a lost connection between American literary realism and ethnography and a productive inquiry into the usefulness of the culture concept as a critical tool in our time and times to come.

In Haunted Bodies, Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson have brought together some of our most highly regarded southern historians and literary critics to consider race, gender, and texts through three centuries and from a wealth of vantage points. Works as diversive as eighteenth-century court petitions and lyrics of 1970s rock music demonstrate how definitions of southern masculinity and femininity have been subject to bewildering shifts and disabling contradictions for centuries.

"In the African-American Grain is a powerful exploration of the impact of African-American oral storytelling techniques on modern and contemporary fiction. Reading literature in the call-and-response tradition, John F. Callahan shows how African-American writers including Charles Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Gaines, and Alice Walker have used the forms and forces of this uniquely participatory discourse to establish not only a potential relationship between storyteller and audience but also a potential for change. In a new preface Callahan comments on how the tradition of call-and-response has continued to develop among African-American writers as well as writers of other backgrounds."