New Orleans
A Literary History

A comprehensive literary history of New Orleans, one of the most storied cities in the world.

T. R. Johnson (Edited by)

9781108705660, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 June 2023

399 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.576 kg

'What T. R. Johnson has assembled in New Orleans: The Literary History is a tremendous contribution to the city's self-understanding - and to everyone's understanding of the city's impact on broader literary histories. With an embracing, inclusive agility, the book excavates layers of culture and language to deliver a comprehensive, international vision of three hundred years' worth of writing, from the published letters of an Ursuline nun in the 1730s to the sissy bounce music of Big Freedia today. Taken together, these scholars present an argument for how New Orleans's literary history has shaped our sense of the pleasures of cities in general and also of the urban imagination itself as a dynamic, shifting thing, with poetry, fiction, memoir and drama intertwining throughout New Orleans's history like the forces that create its legendary climate of heat, humidity, and storm.' Ed Skoog, author of Run the Red Lights

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. This book provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives.

Preface T. R. Johnson
1. Swamp City Anthony Wilson
2. Mixed motives: writing for French audiences from colonial New Orleans Erin Greenwald
3. 'As I have seen and known it': ex-slave autobiographers and the New Orleans Slave Market Calvin Schermerhorn
4. What New Orleans Meant to Walt Whitman Ed Folsom
5. Coloring sex, love, and desire in Creole New Orleans's long nineteenth century Jarrod Hayes
6. The white Creole tradition: Alfred Mercier, Charles Gayarré, Adrien Rouquette, and Grace King Rien Fertel
7. The Civil War's literary aftershocks: George Washington Cable Matthew Smith
8. Illusion and disillusion: the making of Lafcadio Hearn S. Frederick Starr
9. Local color, social problems, and the living dead in the late nineteenth-century short fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson Tara T. Green
10. Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier, and the predicament of the intellectual woman in New Orleans Emily Toth
11. Converging Americas: New Orleans in Spanish-language and Latina/o/x literary culture Kirsten Silva Greusz
12. A Jazz origin-myth: Bras Coupe in history, folklore, and literature Bryan Wagner
13. 'Stepping out' of the storyville frame: recent literary representations of the New Orleans red light district Milena Marinkova
14. Louis Armstrong's autobiographical art Daniel Stein
15. New Orleans, modernism, and The Double Dealer, 1921–1926 Thomas Bonner
16. 'Because what else could he have hoped to find in New Orleans, if not the truth': William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Thadious Davis
17. 'The place I was made for': Tennessee Williams in New Orleans Henry I. Schvey
18. A Civil Rights era novel of the American Civil War: Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels William Bedford Clark
19. How to survive the best environments: narrating Protean place in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer Richmond M. Eustis, Jr
20. Tom Dent and the development of black literature in New Orleans Kalamu Ya Salaam
21. The gothic tradition in New Orleans Taylor Hagood
22. A Flaneur in the French Quarter and beyond: John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces Cory MacLauchlin
23. Literary fiction by New Orleans women, 1961–2003: Shirley Anne Grau, Ellen Gilchrest, Sheila Bosworth, and Valerie Martin Monica Carol Miller
24. Asian American New Orleans Marguerite Nguyen
25. New Orleans rap and bounce: recovering and archiving an expressive tradition Holly Hobbs
26. The literature of Hurricane Katrina Kevin Rabalais
Afterword: swan song? T. R. Johnson
Contributors biographies
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]