The truth of her family's bitter past confronts a West Virginia girl, summoned home from New York by the accidental murder of her brother.

More than ten years in the making, this comprehensive single-volume literary survey is for the student, scholar, and general reader. The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature represents a collaborative effort, involving 300 contributors from across the US and Canada. Composed of more than 1,100 signed biographical-critical entries, this Encyclopedia serves as both guide and companion to the study and appreciation of American literature. A special feature is the topical article, of which there are 70.

Brief biographies and primary / secondary source bibliographies are presented for each author. Authors of note are Harriette Simpson Arnow, Annie Dillard, Wilma Dykeman, Denise Giardina, Barbara Kingsolver, and George Ella Lyon.

In the mid-1950s, when Mary Lee Settle published The Love Eaters and The Kiss of Kin, critics hailed her as a sharp and acidic writer. However, when in subsequent novels the focus of her work shifted from contemporary social realism to historical fiction, the same critics who previously had praised her work lost enthusiasm. In Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet: The Price of Freedom, Brian Rosenberg examines Settle’s work—especially Prisons, O Beulah Land, Know Nothing, The Scapegoat, and The Killing Ground—to show the magnitude and artistic merit in a single, continuous fiction—a fiction of major importance. According to Rosenberg, the Beulah quintet is one of the few grandly ambitious works of historical fiction written by an American woman. In the novels, Settle attempts to apply a European tradition of historical re-creation to American experience and, in so doing, to adapt a largely conservative form to the demands of a revolutionary history and ideology. Although the immediate subject is the history of a region in West Virginia, the deeper subject is nothing less than the history of America: the beliefs, conflicts, and illusions that gave rise to, and continue to distinguish, American culture. Rosenberg also treats the reaction to the Beulah quintet among literary critics. He looks at the neglect and misjudgment the novels have suffered by being labeled historical fiction, a genre often though to consist largely of “romance novels,” and explains why the quintet should be placed among the canonical works of contemporary American literature. Rosenberg includes in his book the transcript of an interview he conducted with Settle in which she reflects on both her intentions as a writer and the reception of her work. Mary Lee Settle’s fiction has for too long been misperceived. Brian Rosenberg’s thorough analysis of the Beulah quintet will allow a larger audience to understand the nature and scope of her achievement.

Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing—these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The history of southern women’s literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies.

This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.

Argues that most words do not have multiple meanings and criticizes the assignment of additional meanings through overspecification