McHaney, Pearl Amelia. Representations of Women in Southern Literature. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. 2019.
The book deals with the portrayal of women in southern literature, looking at the roles they adopt in different literary works. These roles range from rebels, commonly associated with southern women in the nineteenth century, to those of human rights advocates, political activists, and medical gurus that can be found in the literature of today (McHaney, 2019). Southern women are ready to discard their past and re-evaluate activities they want to engage in. Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia poems feature a girl, destitute in her loneliness, who is eager to find a decent job to provide for herself. This image is addressed as a “mulatto” prototype, a person redefining her values and outlook.
Simonson, Thomas. “The Poet Legislator.” The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English, vol. 19, no. 1, 2017, pp. 3-7.
This article looks upon the poetry of the postmodernist era, especially that of Natasha Trethewey, and the images the author creates in her works. Simonson states that though the self-perception of southern women changed, there are still sad undertones speaking about their past, which is best forgotten (Simonson, 2017). The article concludes that the distinctive poetry of female postmodernists ports is tragic, but at the same time, there are undercurrents of hope and new life in their works.
Sharp, Ryan. In the Shadow of the Archive: The Big Smoke and Black American Persona Poetry. African American Review, vol 52, no. 4, 2019, pp. 373-387.
The book asserts that black persona poetry arose as an answer to aggression and abuse that could be witnessed in relation to Afro-American people. Contemporary poets had to speak on the part of their persona to portray the pain and suffering of black females that have gone unnoticed (Sharp, 2019). Moreover, the persona poetry vividly portrays current problems these females face, since though the past is discarded, the feeling of it is still there. Poets highlight the issues of loneliness, of not being taken seriously, of roles imposed and no real concern for people’s feelings.
Rueda-Ramos, Carmen, and Susana Jiménez Placer, eds. Constructing the Self: Essays on Southern Life-writing, Universitat de València, 2018, p. 147-152.
The article looks at the portrayal of poets’ perceptions and experiences in southern literature. Persona poetry is one of the forms with the help of which poets call attention to how they or their ancestors might have felt recently and in the years part (Rueda-Ramos, 2018). Though, as a rule, there is no direct mention of poets’ experience in a novel or poetic form, it is easy to draw inferences from personae’s words and see how writers and poets feel.
Works Cited
McHaney, Pearl Amelia. Representations of Women in Southern Literature. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2019. Web.
Rueda-Ramos, Carmen, and Susana Jiménez Placer, eds. Constructing the Self: Essays on Southern Life-writing. Universitat de València, 2018, pp. 147-152.
Sharp, Ryan. “In the Shadow of the Archive: The Big Smoke and Black American Persona Poetry.” African American Review, vol. 52, no. 4, 2019, pp. 373-387.
Simonson, Thomas. “The Poet Legislator.” The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English, vol. 19, no. 1, 2017, pp. 3-7.