Georgia Stories: Major Georgia Short Fiction of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Softcover

9781561450671: Georgia Stories: Major Georgia Short Fiction of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1561450677 ISBN 13: 9781561450671

Publisher: Peachtree Pub Ltd, 1992

When we think of the Old South and its literature, we think of romance--of moonlight and magnolias and courtly cavaliers dueling and battling for fair and fiery maidens fluttering from the balconies of their mansions. In his introduction, editor Ben Forkner explains that most nineteenth-century southern novels fostered this romantic image in the form of great sweeping sagas with larger-than-life heroes and heroines. However, countering this tradition are the short gems of Georgia, which represent a frontier culture and a pioneering literature that was "vigorous and vivid and enduring at a time when the great mass of southern fiction, with few exceptions, had precious little to praise or to preserve."

Whereas the majority of nineteenth-century novels have faded into oblivion, the Georgia short story has thrived. In the work of Joel Chandler Harris and Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, the lives of the middle and lower classes, black and white, are presented with realism, humor, and healthy self-mockery that have reverberated through both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, influencing the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Erskine Caldwell, Carson McCullers and Alice Walker. Wealth and poverty, humor and tragedy, the Old South and the New--although we may still not understand what makes up the Southern identity, surely in "Georgia Stories" we recognize its distinctive presence.

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About the Author:

Ben Forkner is a professor of English and American literature at the University of Angers in France. A graduate of Stetson University in Florida, he received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published essay on writers from Ireland and form the American South and has edited several anthologies of short stories: MODERN IRISH SHORT STORIES, A NEW BOOK OF DUBLINERS, and LOUISIANA STORIES. With Patrick Samway, S.J., Professor Forkner has co-edited four anthologies of Southern literature, STORIES OF THE MODERN SOUTH, STORIES OF THE OLD SOUTH, A MODERN SOUTHERN READER (Peachtree), A NEW READER OF THE OLD SOUTH (Peachtree), and GEORGIA STORIES (Peachtree).

From Library Journal:

These grand tributes to Georgian fiction contain many of the same authors--Joel Chandler Harris, Flannery O'Connor, and Alice Walker, to name a few--and offer equally fine selections that will be enjoyed by general readers and by students of literature. Stories has a single rather garrulous and digressive introduction, but Voices offers a separate introduction for each of its three parts. While Stories presents limited biographical data about each writer, the information in Voices is more extensive. Nine authors are represented in Stories , 32 in Voices , and while Forkner asserts that Stories demonstrates Georgia's literary tradition, Ruppersburg simply calls Voices enjoyable reading. Despite Ruppersburg's disclaimer that his book is not an historical anthology, Voices is a fine history of Georgian literature. Both collections offer short fiction, but Voices also includes excerpts from novels such as Gone with the Wind , Deliverance , and The Prince of Tides. Furthermore, this work is the first of a threevolume anthology; Ruppersburg plans collections of Georgia nonfiction and poetry. Libraries should obtain both books since only four selections are the same; if the budget allows only one, Voices is the better buy.
- Dorothy Golden, Georgia Southern Univ., Statesboro
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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