“Southern Fringes: Little Magazines and Larry Brown’s Early Short Fiction” seeks to revitalize and expand the scholarly field of the New Southern Studies, employing textuality, book history, and postcritique perspectives towards the study of literary events and objects. Whereas the New Southern Studies rightly problematizes and dismantles notions of the signifier southern named in connection with literary works, such approaches often ignore paratextual elements, including material and sociological features, that work to frame and support these narratives. This dissertation addresses such shortcomings, arguing that paratextual formations function as vital spaces for constructing senses of southernness in service of both bibliographic identity and readers’ literary discernments. Exploring public epitext in a variety of locations, as well as four cases of Larry Brown’s short stories appearing in Mississippi Review, The Greensboro Review, and The Chattahoochee Review, this dissertation demonstrates how Brown’s writing emerges as southern fringe: a joint presence of autobiographic, material, perceptual, and other paratextual elements that frame Brown’s writing in unique locales outside of the literary mainstream. This dissertation's implications include adopting a mode of reading and analysis, focusing on case studies and surface readings of paratext serving specific bibliographic documents, as a way to move beyond generalizing and broad claims about the nature, function, and interpretation of literature. Additionally, this dissertation focuses on little magazines, materiality, and paratext as expanded sites and perspectives for the continued growth and development of interdisciplinary humanities fields such as the New Southern Studies. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis seeks to understand the South as a space through which the contested bodies of two literary characters and the men who authored them can be more fully explored: the Ex- Colored Man in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Nicholas Worth in Walter Hines Page's The Southerner; each appearing within an early twentieth-century novel masquerading as an autobiography. These bodies serve to help us understand how the regional Other of the South has inflicted itself on individuals living in the South and caused an irreparable fracture to the characters' identities forcing them into passing roles in lives they do not see as their own. This passing allows the characters to adopt a new persona in the communities that they inhabit, but never permits them to inhabit new bodies themselves. They are always left with the perception that they do not corporeally belong and the anxiety that the "truth" about their body might be exposed at any moment. Ultimately, the thesis also challenges the notion of passing as merely racial and explores other forms of passing, especially ones dealing with geography (i.e. a Southerner passing as a Northerner) and explains that the New Southern Studies needs to find ways to examine the South that are not dependent on racial binaries.

The present MA thesis discusses Eudora Welty's short fiction and the author's engagement with the plantation memory. The introductory chapter defines the concept of plantation memory as a flux of the normative plantation binaries, the plantation mythology obscuring the ante-bellum Southern reality, the linguistic and phenomenal evidence of the prevailing oppression, and the ability of the text and its creator to subvert the official narratives and to liberate the individuals' silenced voices. Applying an interdisciplinary approach, the thesis examines the processes in which the particular selves are confronted with the plantation order and in which their identities are consolidated, either resisting or crumbling under the social pressure. The three analytical chapters of the thesis discuss nine of Welty's short stories that were selected from The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty on the basis of the typology and criteria outlined in the introduction. Without claiming that the nine stories present the sum of Welty's artistic achievement, the texts attempt to demonstrate general tendencies and narrative strategies that the author applies in her short fiction, writing about and within the plantation memory. The selection includes as many different texts as possible and contains three stories and three...