"For Alexander" is an exhibition about masculinity as it is exhibited by Southern "good ole boys". I rely on original and appropriated imagery, as well as memories of loss and humor from my childhood in Alabama. Combining mixed media and sculptural elements has allowed me to investigate the subjects that interest me. I explore and artistically comment on these subjects through a mix of personal and culturally loaded imagery that records what I have either experienced or researched, and which I realize through the ironic use of non-traditional materials, such as sequins and rhinestones. My work examines stereotypes and my own beliefs about Southern good ole boys. I also reflect on elements of Southern hypocrisy, and I question long standing social practices with the help of historical and contemporary media sources. My exhibition is dedicated to my great uncle, who was murdered by his father, a preacher, during the Great Depression.

Katherine Anne Porter wrote The Old Order stories in the early 1930s; and while there is no evidence that she ever revised them on a story level, she revised the order of the stories over more than thirty years in three collections: The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), The Old Order: Stories of the South from The Leaning Tower, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and Flowering Judas (1955), and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965). Individually, each story is its own episodic memory based on Miranda’s adult recollections of childhood experiences. Collectively, Porter’s rearrangement of these stories over time both deconstructs and reconstructs Miranda’s narrative from a chronological to a representational recollection. Therefore, while the individual stories reveal memory’s imprint on identity, the progressive reordering of The Old Order stories reveals a reconstructive process of memory which repositions itself over time.

Recent debates as to the place of Old South symbols and institutions in the South of the new millennium are evidence of a changing order in the South. I examine -- from a rhetorical perspective informed by Kenneth Burke's theory of identification and division -- four debates that have taken place in the South and/or about the South over roughly the past decade, 1995 to the present. In this decade, Southerners and interested others have debated such issues as 1) admitting women to the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel; 2) integrating displays of public art in Richmond to feature Confederates and African Americans side by side; 3) continuing to fly the Confederate battle flag in public spaces such as the South Carolina Capitol or including it in the designs of state flags such as those of Georgia and Mississippi; and 4) allowing Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, who seemed to speak out in support of the South's segregated past, to continue in his position of Senate leadership. Looking at each of these debates, it is clear that at issue in each is whether the ruling order of the South should continue to be one of division or whether that order should be supplanted by identification. Judging from the outcomes of the four debates analyzed here, the order of division seems to be waning just as the order of identification seems to be waxing in influence over the turn-of-the-millennium South. But a changing South is no less a distinctive, continuing South. I argue that a distinctive Southern culture based on a sense of order has existed and continues to exist amidst the larger American culture. If some form of "Southernism" is to continue as a distinctive mindset and way of life in the twenty-first century, Southerners will need to learn to strike a balance between their past, with its ruling order of division, and the present, with its ruling order of identification.

This study will investigate Sears, Roebuck & Co. and the special relationship it established with the South during the first half of the twentieth-century. The study will examine oral interviews with former employees, southern literature and customer letters from the region in an effort to better understand how Sears became more than just a friend to the poor dirt farmers of the South; it became a uniquely southern institution.

This dissertation argues that the four writers named above use the grotesque to illustrate the increasingly peculiar consequences of the assault of modernity on traditional Southern culture. The basic conflict between the views of Bakhtin and Kayser provides the foundation for defining the grotesque herein, and Geoffrey Harpham's concept of "margins" helps to define interior and exterior areas for the discussion. Chapter 1 lays a foundation for why the South is different from other regions of America, emphasizing the influences of Anglo-Saxon culture and traditions brought to these shores by the English gentlemen who settled the earliest tidewater colonies as well as the later influx of Scots-Irish immigrants (the Celtic-Southern thesis) who settled the Piedmont and mountain regions. This chapter also notes that part of the South's peculiarity derives from the cultural conflicts inherent between these two groups. Chapters 2 through 5 analyze selected short fiction from each of these respective authors and offer readings that explain how the grotesque relates to the drastic social changes taking place over the half-century represented by these authors. Chapter 6 offers an evaluation of how and why such traditions might be preserved. The overall argument suggests that traditional Southern culture grows out of four foundations, i. e., devotion to one's community, devotion to one's family, devotion to God, and love of place. As increasing modernization and homogenization impact the South, these cultural foundations have been systematically replaced by unsatisfactory or confusing substitutes, thereby generating something arguably grotesque. Through this exchange, the grotesque has moved from the observably physical, as shown in the earlier works discussed, to something internalized that is ultimately depicted through a kind of intellectual if not physical stasis, as shown through the later works.

David Harrison Macon (1870-1952) is often memorialized for his showmanship rather than his banjo playing. To compartmentalize such a significant American musician yields a wide gap within scholarship about Macon, country music history and the banjo. Macon’s banjo playing, documented through over two-hundred and fifty recordings made between the 1920s and 1950s, represents an array of cultures, eras, ethnicities, and styles all preserved in the repertoire of one of the most prolific country musicians of the 20th century. This study reveals Macon’s playing by considering such factors as influences that preceded his professional tenure, identifying elements within his playing from specific stylistic origins, and by technically notating selections from Macon’s canon that represent those influences. To understand the instrumental playing of one of early country music’s most important figures broadens understanding of banjo influences from the nineteenth century which laid the foundation for the instrument’s renaissance in the twentieth century.

This thesis examines the relationship between Southern literature and socio-cultural realities of the Southern region of the United States of America. Analyzing works of five distinguished Southern writers, this thesis examines the reflection of specific Southern culture features in literature of the region in the period from the end of the American Civil War to the second half of the 20th century. The thesis oppose the opinion that the primary goal of Southern literature was to promote Southern identity and its cultural superiority above the North. The central hypothesis, that is being verified by this thesis, is that despite the indisputable contribution of highly recognized Southern writers to building of Southern identity, these authors expressed in their works also often sharp critiques of the social conditions in the South.

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<p> </p> <p>Throughout the long 1970s, country music actively sought to cultivate a more traditional, “authentic,” and conservative image and sound. By examining the country music industry, during the long 1970s, this dissertation highlights how authenticity, Southern heritage, and traditionalism within country music overlapped with the South’s broader resistance to social change. Past studies of country music have primarily been concerned with how the music and its traditional format represent the working-class culture of its audience. However, very little attention has been paid to how this adherence to authenticity and traditionalism impacted its artists, particularly the female ones. In turn, the scholarship that does pertain solely to female artists is often dismissive of the impact that the country music industry and its restrictive culture had on female artists and instead opts to foster a retroactively feminist portrayal of the them and their music.</p> <p>In examining the careers of Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Tanya Tucker, and Tammy Wynette, this dissertation argues that country music held its female artists to a far stricter standard than its male artists throughout the long 1970s and actively encouraged them to foster lyrics and personas that were in line with the genre’s conception of traditional femininity. Over time, artists like Lynn and Wynette became so intrinsically connected to these traditional personas that they could not escape it, which negatively impacted not only their careers but personal lives as well. Likewise, when Parton and Tucker attempted to challenge the gendered restriction that they encountered within country music, they were punished and shunned by the broader country music community to the point that they left it altogether. </p> <p>By exploring these highly calculated measures that the industry used to maintain each of these elements and its broader effects on the genre, its artists, and audience base, this dissertation also highlights how the authenticity label evolved into a gatekeeping term, employed at various times throughout the industry’s history to prevent unsatisfactory or controversial ideologies, images, people, and musical elements from gaining access to or the ability to change and diversify the genre. </p>