Dreamworlds of Alabama

Передняя обложка
U of Minnesota Press - Всего страниц: 197
“I speak in what others often hear as a strange accent. My past can’t be located. I live in Buffalo, New York, an exile from the South. But these aren’t Yankee dreams, even though my past seems like a fabrication, a dreamworld in which I’m a paper character and not a historical participant, with scars from barbed wire ripping under the pressure and flying through the air like a swarm of bees, or a horse rearing up and banging its head into mine from within, exploding my forehead.” —from the Preface

 

Wisteria draped on a soldier’s coffin, sent home to Alabama from a Virginia battlefield. The oldest standing house in the county, painted gray and flanked by a pecan orchard. A black steel fence tool, now perched atop a pile of books like a prehistoric bird of prey. In Dreamworlds of Alabama, Allen Shelton explores physical, historical, and social landscapes of northeastern Alabama. His homeplace near the Appalachian foothills provides the setting for a rich examination of cultural practices, a place where the language of place and things resonates with as much vitality and emotional urgency as the language of humans.

 

Throughout the book, Shelton demonstrates how deeply culture is inscribed in the land and in the most intimate spaces of the person—places of belonging and loss, insight and memory.

 

Born and raised in Jacksonville, Alabama, Allen Shelton is associate professor of sociology at Buffalo State College.

Результаты поиска по книге

Содержание

The Mark on the Spade
1
The Abduction of Mary Janie
31
Planchette My Love
59
The Stars beneath Alabama
93
Assembling Mary Pullen for a Cry
133
Notes
167
List of Illustrations
195
Publication History
197
Авторские права

Другие издания - Просмотреть все

Часто встречающиеся слова и выражения

Популярные отрывки

Стр. 31 - Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
Стр. 10 - It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded — as it were, 'oceanic'.
Стр. 161 - It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
Стр. 183 - Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.
Стр. 120 - In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.
Стр. 178 - Throw up a handful of feathers and all fall to the ground according to definite laws; but how simple is the problem where each shall fall compared to that of the action and reaction of the innumerable plants and animals which have determined, in the course of centuries, the proportional numbers and kinds of trees now growing on the old Indian ruins!
Стр. 115 - It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to start dancing of its own accord.

Об авторе

Allen Shelton is associate professor of sociology at Buffalo State College in New York.

Библиографические данные