Chapter 16 | A Community of  Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Seeing the Extraordinary in the Ordinary

William Eggleston’s photographs illuminate Southern spaces in surprising ways

By Peter Kuryla | January 29, 2020

The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston, collects 55 of the artist’s works from the 1960s through the 1980s. Primarily everyday scenes from the South during a transitional period in the region’s history, Eggleston’s photographs make the ordinary extraordinary or even dreamlike, capturing time and place but not without significant historical allusions.

Revisiting the Movement

Robert Penn Warren’s 1964 interviews with civil-rights activists get an updated look

By Peter Kuryla | April 17, 2019

With Free All Along: The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews, editors Stephen Drury Smith and Catherine Ellis encourage a new community of readers to revisit the ideas and experiences of civil-rights activists and thinkers during the movement’s height.

Black in Appalachia

Karida Brown explores the way ideas of home have shaped an oft-overlooked population

By Peter Kuryla | October 10, 2018

In Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia, Karida L. Brown recovers the remarkable story of how black Appalachians defined themselves and their home in the coal-mining towns of Kentucky during the broad middle of the twentieth century. Brown will appear at the 2018 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 12-14.

Love and Theft

Exploring the idea of an American national literature, Jason Richards finds a complex play of imitations

By Peter Kuryla | April 20, 2018

In Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature, Rhodes College professor Jason Richards brings theoretical sophistication to close readings of some well-known and not so well-known texts in American literature, showing the complexities of cultural imitation before the Civil War.

Faith and Serpents

Julia C. Duin turns up a sordid tale at the fringes of American religion

By Peter Kuryla | February 21, 2018

With ln the House of the Serpent Handler Julia C. Duin depicts the lives of the faithful in Appalachian serpent-handling churches, charting the tragic fall of one its leading lights.

Confounding Brilliance

Scholars ponder Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on its seventy-fifth anniversary

By Peter Kuryla | June 16, 2017

In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75, a transatlantic group of scholars reconsiders James Agee’s classic Depression-era account of three Alabama sharecropping families and the problem of representing them in words and images.