Catherine Carmier

Catherine Carmier
Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2012-10-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307830349

A compelling debut love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence--by the award-winning author of A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. After living in San Francisco for ten years, Jackson returns home to his benefactor, Aunt Charlotte. Surrounded by family and old friends, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation from those around him, he falls in love with Catherine Carmier, setting the stage for conflicts and confrontations which are complex, tortuous, and universal in their implications.

Catherine Carmier

Catherine Carmier
Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 258
Release: 1993-03-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0679738916

A compelling debut love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence--by the award-winning author of A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. After living in San Francisco for ten years, Jackson returns home to his benefactor, Aunt Charlotte. Surrounded by family and old friends, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation from those around him, he falls in love with Catherine Carmier, setting the stage for conflicts and confrontations which are complex, tortuous, and universal in their implications.

Swinging in Place

Swinging in Place
Author: Jocelyn Hazelwood Donlon
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2001
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780807849774

An appreciation of the significance of the porch in everyday life in the US South. It reveals that the porch is a stage for many social dramas, and it uses literature, folklore, oral histories and photographs to show how southerners have used the porch to negotiate public and private boundaries.

Southscapes

Southscapes
Author: Thadious M. Davis
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807835218

In this innovative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to articulate the vexed connections between society and environment, particularly under segregation and its legacies.<

Ernest J. Gaines

Ernest J. Gaines
Author: Karen Carmean
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 184
Release: 1998-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0313317259

Drawing on his rich Louisiana past, Ernest J. Gaines creates a fictional world representative of the human experience. His work explores the complex racial relationships—so much a part of Southern history and culture—and the unwritten and unspoken conventions of caste and class. Often structured around journeys of discovery, Gaines' works affirm the integrity of the individual and the unequivocal place in American life for Americans of African descent. This study offers a clear, accessible reading of Gaines' fiction. It analyzes in turn all of Gaines' novels as well as his collection of short stories. A complete bibliography of Gaines' fiction, as well as selected reviews and criticism, completes the study. Following a biographical chapter on Gaines' life, an overview of his fiction explores his work in light of his literary heritage and use of genre. Each of the following chapters examines an individual novel: Catherine Carmier (1964), Of Love and Dust (1967), The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), In My Father's House (1978), A Gathering of Old Men (1983), A Lesson Before Dying (1994), and a collection of short stories, Bloodline (1968). The discussion of each work includes sections on plot and character development, thematic issues, and an alternative critical approach from which to read the novel. Carmean shows how each of Gaines' novels focuses on themes of personal value and place and affirms the need for recognizing the value of the individual, regardless of race. This study will help readers to understand the compelling issue of human relationships raised by Gaines and to see why he is one of America's finest writers.

Approaches to Teaching Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Works

Approaches to Teaching Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Works
Author: John Wharton Lowe
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2019-08-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1603294228

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman tells the story of a woman, a community, and the African American experience from the Civil War through Jim Crow to the civil rights movement. This narrative and Gaines's other novels and short stories explore the life of blacks in the South, their religious traditions and folkways, and their struggles under oppression. The southern communities described are diverse: blacks, creoles of color, poor whites, and wealthy landowners. Part 1 of this volume provides biographical information about Ernest Gaines and a discussion of critical and background studies of his narrative. The essays in part 2 will help teachers of African American literature, American literature, and southern literature convey to their students various aspects of Gaines's work and the adaptations of it in relation to southern literature, history, music, folk culture, and vernaculars of English.

Conversations with Ernest Gaines

Conversations with Ernest Gaines
Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 366
Release: 1995
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780878057832

Collected interviews with the award-winning African American author of A Lesson Before Dying, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, "The Sky Is Gray," and many other works

Navigating the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines

Navigating the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines
Author: Keith Clark
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2020-03-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 080717338X

One of the South’s most revered writers, Ernest J. Gaines attracts both popular and academic audiences. Gaines’s unique literary style, depiction of the African American experience, and celebration of the rural South’s oral tradition have brought him critical praise and numerous accolades, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel A Lesson before Dying. In this welcome guide to Gaines’s fiction, Keith Clark offers insightful analyses of his novels and short stories. Clark’s close readings elucidate Gaines’s more acclaimed works—including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Gathering of Old Men—while also introducing lesser-known but masterfully crafted pieces, such as the story “Three Men” and the civil rights novel In My Father’s House. Gaines’s most recent work, The Tragedy of Brady Sims, receives here one of its first critical examinations. Clark shows how the themes of Gaines’s literary oeuvre, produced over the past fifty years, dovetail with issues reverberating in twenty-first-century America: race and the criminal justice system; black masculinity; the environment; the enduring impact of slavery; black southern women’s voices; and blacks’ and whites’ interpretation of history. In addition to textual discussions, the book includes an interview Clark conducted with Gaines at the writer’s home in New Roads, Louisiana, in 2014, further illuminating the inner workings and personality of this eminent literary artist.

Policing Intimacy

Policing Intimacy
Author: Jenna Grace Sciuto
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496833465

In Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, author Jenna Grace Sciuto analyzes literary depictions of sexual policing of the color line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories: Mississippi through William Faulkner’s work, Louisiana through Ernest Gaines’s novels, Haiti through the work of Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through writing by Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario. This literature exposes the continuing coloniality that links depictions of US democracy with Caribbean dictatorships in the twentieth century, revealing a set of interrelated features characterizing the transformation of colonial forms of racial and sexual control into neocolonial reconfigurations. A result of systemic inequality and large-scale historical events, the patterns explored herein reveal the ways in which private relations can reflect national occurrences and the intimate can be brought under public scrutiny. Acknowledging the widespread effects of racial and sexual policing that persist in current legal, economic, and political infrastructures across the circum-Caribbean can in turn bring to light permutations of resistance to the violent discriminations of the status quo. By drawing on colonial documents, such as early law systems like the 1685 French Code Noir instated in Haiti, the 1724 Code Noir in Louisiana, and the 1865 Black Code in Mississippi, in tandem with examples from twentieth-century literature, Policing Intimacy humanizes the effects of legal histories and leaves space for local particularities. By focusing on literary texts and variances in form and aesthetics, Sciuto demonstrates the necessity of incorporating multiple stories, histories, and traumas into accounts of the past.

Ernest J. Gaines

Ernest J. Gaines
Author: Dennis Abrams
Publisher: Infobase Learning
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2013-11
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1438149182

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his 1993 novel;A Lesson Before Dying, recipient of the National Humanities Medal, and author of the classic;The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest J.