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A white woman living in segregated Georgia during the first half of the twentieth century, Lillian Smith surprised readers with stories of mixed-race love affairs, mob attacks on “outsiders,” and young female campers exploring their sexuality. Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith considers Smith’s evolution from a young girls’ camp director into a courageous artist engaging difficult topics with frankness and courage. She did not pull punches in her portrayals of the South, yet she devoted herself to the artist’s role as she saw it: to lead readers toward a better understanding of themselves and a more fulfilling existence. Smith’s writings cut to the core of the neurotic behaviors she observed and participated in as a Southerner. To draw readers into her exploration of those behaviors, she invites them into compelling stories, employing literary techniques that foster critical reconsideration of stubbornly dominant ideologies. With words as her medium, she sketches maps of fictionalized Southern places, in the process revealing the markers of wounds and disfunction. Smith offers readers an intimate glimpse into her own childhood as well as the psychological traumas that all Southerners experience and help to perpetuate. Comprised of seven essays by contemporary Smith scholars, Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith explores Smith’s writings in an attempt to yield a clear portrait of this charismatic figure, whose work was crucial in her own time and is profoundly relevant in the twenty-first century, as well.

In contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little attention in southern studies, and women playwrights in general receive less recognition than their male counterparts. This book addresses these gaps in its examination of the work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that representations of the American South on stage are complicated by difficulties of identity, genre, and region. Success in American drama is defined as having a play staged in the capital of theatre culture, New York City, the city that might be viewed as most antithetical to the South in terms of geography and ideology. Further, women playwrights, women playwrights of color, and those who express queer identities have been vocal about persistent inequities in American theatre which have created obstacles to their success. Drama creates unique problems for playwrights through its concentrated focus on place, dialect, and character; the multiple layers of authorship; the collective reception format; and the demand for exaggeration within production. These issues, as they interact with regional conditions and perceptions, pose problems for southern women playwrights in navigating how to represent a marginalized region on the stage. Through analysis of the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and its productions, this book delineates these challenges and argues that playwrights confront obstacles through various conscious strategies. These approaches lead audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and southern regions and ultimately, they create new visions of the South.

By examining the novels of critically and commercially successful authors such as Sarah Dessen (Someone Like You), Stephenie Meyer (the Twilight series), and Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak), this book explores the use of narrative intimacy as a means of reflecting and reinforcing larger, often contradictory, cultural expectations regarding adolescent women, interpersonal relationships, and intimacy. It explains the construction of narrator–reader relationships in recent American novels written about, and marketed to, adolescent women. The author explains, though, that such levels of imagined friendship lead to contradictory cultural expectations for the young women so deeply obsessed with reading these novels. She coins the term “narrative intimacy” to refer to the implicit relationship between narrator and reader that depends on an imaginary disclosure and trust between the story’s narrator and the reader. Through critical examination, the inherent contradictions between this enclosed, imagined relationship and the real expectations for adolescent women’s relations prove to be problematic. In many novels for young women, adolescent female narrators construct conceptions of the adolescent woman reader that allow the narrator to understand the reader as a confidant, a safe and appropriate location for disclosure. At the same time, such novels offer frequent warnings against the sort of unfettered confession the narrators perform. Friendships are marked as potential sites of betrayal and rejection. Romantic relationships are presented as inherently threatening to physical and emotional health.