Preserving the Old Dominion

by James Michael Lindgren

1993 · University of Virginia Press

In 1889 tradition-minded women, including many from Virginia's most prominent families, formed the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA), the first state preservation organization in the United States. And where better? After all, who else could so readily claim both colonial and Confederate heritage, both Jamestown and the White House of the Confederacy? In Preserving the Old Dominion cultural historian James Lindgren shows how the preservation movement strove to rebuild a revered past upon the foundations of its historic structures. While vividly capturing entertaining incidents - white-gloved pilgrimages, a Richmond costume ball, even a search for a Jamestown Rock to set back those arriviste New Englanders - and introducing battling (often with each other) preservationists, Lindgren also explores the serious consequences of these sometimes amusing efforts. He shows how the reinvention of the past shaped contemporary Virginia and the South. In a very real sense the battle between North and South was replayed at the end of the nineteenth century in a contest to control the nation's past. The AVPA's significance lies not only in the fact that it played a major role in the resurgence of conservatism in the late nineteenth-century South, but that it fits into a larger American picture where tradition-minded Americans tapped their history - whether imagined or real - to shape their identity. Preserving the Old Dominion incorporates history, anthropology, architecture, archaeology, religion, and politics; it will be of interest to historians in all fields as well as women's studies scholars.

The Oxford Companion to American Literature

by James D. Hart, Phillip Leininger

1995 · Oxford University Press

For more than half a century, James D. Hart's The Oxford Companion to American Literature has been an unparalleled guide to America's literary culture, providing one of the finest resources to this country's rich history of great writers. Now this acclaimed work has been completely revised and updated to reflect current developments in the world of American letters.For the sixth edition, editors James D. Hart and Phillip Leininger have updated the Companion in light of what has happened in American literature since 1982. To this end, they have revised the entries on such established authors as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Joyce Carol Oates, and they have added more than 180 new entries on novelists (T. Coraghessan Boyle, Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich, Don De Lillo), poets (Rita Dove, Weldon Kees), playwrights (Wendy Wasserstein, August Wilson), popular writers (Stephen King, Louis L'Amour), historians (James M. McPherson, David Herbert Donald, William Manchester), naturalists (Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey), and literary critics (Camille Paglia, Richard Ellmann). In addition, the Companion boasts more women's, African-American, and ethnic voices, with new entries on such luminaries as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, M.F.K. Fisher, William Least Heat-Moon, Ursula Le Guin, and Oscar Hijuelos, among many others.These additions represent only some of the revisions for the new edition. Of course, the basic qualities of the Companion that readers have grown to know and love over the years are as superb as ever. With over 5,000 total entries, The Oxford Companion to American Literature reflects a dynamic balance between past and contemporary literature, surveying virtually every aspect of our national literature, from the Pulitzer Prize to pulp fiction, and from Walt Whitman to William F. Buckley, Jr. There are over 2,000 biographical profiles of important American authors (with information regarding their styles, subjects, and major works) and influential foreign writers as well as other figures who have been important in the nation's social and cultural history. There are more than 1,100 full summaries of important American novels, stories, essays, poems (with verse form noted), plays, biographies and autobiographies, tracts, narratives, and histories. The new edition provides historical background and astute commentary on literary schools and movements, literary awards, magazines, newspapers, and a wide variety of other matters directly related to writing in America. Finally, the book is thoroughly cross-referenced and features an extensive and fully updated index of literary and social history.Ranging from Captain John Smith to John Updike, and from Anne Bradstreet to Anne Rice, the sixth edition of The Oxford Companion to American Literature is up to date, accurate, and comprehensive, a delight for both the casual browser and the serious student.