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Tax-exempt? | To Hell and Back Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel Jeff Abernathy assesses cross-racial pairings in American literature following Huckleberry Finn to show that this pattern of engagement and betrayal appears repeatedly in our fiction-notably southern fiction-just as it appears throughout American history and culture. He contends that such stories of companionship and rejection express opposing tenets of American culture: a persistent vision of democracy and the racial hierarchy that undermines it. Abernathy traces this pattern through works by William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Kaye Gibbons, Sara Flanigan, Elizabeth Spencer, Padgett Powell, Ellen Douglas, and Glasgow Phillips. He then demonstrates how African American writers pointedly contest the pattern. The works of Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright, for example, "portray autonomous black characters and white characters who must earn their own salvation, or gain it not at all." Jeff Abernathy is Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of the College, and Professor of English at West Virginia Wesleyan College. December 2003 ISBN 0820325783 paper • $24.95 240 pp. • 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 in."Critics have long argued that Twain started something big with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Thanks to this most impressive study we know much more about just what he started. In developing a compelling white character who was almost, but not quite, coaxed out of whiteness by an African American mentor and friend, Twain set a pattern for ambivalent white southern literary liberalism on race and for African American efforts to push beyond the limits of such liberalism." —Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class"Literally and truly a heartening book. Because Abernathy has thought deeply about black-white relations. Because he illuminates many concerned novelists since Mark Twain. And because he incisively helps us to search for the most promising path forward." —Louis Budd, editor of Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews"Complementing Montserrat Gines's The Southern Inheritors of Don Quixote, which addresses similar and related issues in Twain's and Faulkner's writing, this thoughtful study goes beyond the genre of literary studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended." —Choice"To Hell and Back is a wide-ranging, accesible work on essential elements of American life."-University Press Book Review "This thoughtful study goes beyond the genre of literary studies."-Choice "Abernathy establishes the continued relevance of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to life in the U.S.. Abernathy shows that, though most readers find Twain's conclusion unsatifactory, our repeasted efforts to renegotiate the relationship between black and white in our history and in our literature have yielded similarly unsatisfying results."-Betina Entzminger, College Literature "Abernathy's To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel is without question one of the bravest forays into racial politics and literary production that has been written. . . . To Hell and Back is an extraordinary book, well argued without being condescending and penetrating in its analysis without being vicious or petty. Abernathy has thrown down the gauntlet of racial crossing as it were and has challenged the South and its writers to move beyond the pattern of betrayal."-Warren J. Carson, The Southern Literary Journal"Abernathy convincingly demonstrates how the southern novel has repeatedly stages the same fitful progress toward and the final evasion of racial communion. His finely attentive and focused readings of a century of southern fiction establish such friendship and betrayals as a kind of American myth. . . . Abernathy's reading is so persuasive that readers will quickly start extending it to other novels by white authors not discussed in his book."-Gary M. Ciuba, African American Review "These books contribute to this generation's thriving dialogue across the color line, displaying abundant cross-pollination of texts and ideas across that historical divide. Abernathy's book is broadly humanistic in its scope and purpose . Although To Hell and Back is scholarly in approach, it's nice to see that Abernathy courts nonspecialist readers such as might be found in an undergraduate classroom. Scholars might seek such inclusiveness more often." -American Literature "In this late-breaking but ultimately more compelling version of the development of cross-racial pairings in twentieth-century novels, Abernathy introduces patterns of influence between white and African American novelists that disrupt the racially segregated, identitarian definition of "the southern novel" with which he began ... His thoughtful and deeply felt dramatization of his own critical struggle works powerfully toward his overarching goal: to remind us that the failures and betrayals recorded in Twain's novel are not relics of our national past but challenges still to be overcome."-Modern Language Quarterly |
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