Lecture with

Dr. Rebecca Harrison

(University of West Georgia)

The Female Aesthetic in the Modern South: „A ConfederacyofWaterMoccasins“

July 20, 2016; 10 am (10 Uhr c.t.)
S 1, Philosophicum
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

This talk will provide an overview of the concerns occupying Southern woman writers of the modernist period, a field ostensibly dominated by the fugitives and writers such as William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. Rather than merely asking her audience to “remember the ladies” (as Abigail Adams once said in a memorable phrase directed at her husband, John), Professor Harrison will speak to the creative and highly innovative work being produced by such authors as Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Maddox Roberts, and Lilian Smith. Their work, she contends, offers a counter-narrative to the male writers’ ongoing obsession with the “lost cause” of the Civil War. No less concerned with issues of politics, history, the land, and especially gender issues, these women writers provided a new vision of life in the modern South that transcended engrained myths of womanhood and racial identity. Specifically, Professor Harrison will share work from her original archival research into the much-neglected early 20th-century Charleston poet Beatrice Witte Ravenel.

 

Download the poster here.