<p> In the South, as William Faulkner famously observed in his 1951 novel <i> Requiem for a Nun</i>, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The power of historical narrative is not lost on the region’s contemporary writers either, including poets Minnie Bruce Pratt, Brenda Marie Osbey, and Natasha Trethewey. This thesis examines these poets’ works within the context of Southern studies, as well as the ways in which each poet grounds counter-narratives in Southern soil, and communal memories in the region’s marginalized bodies. Establishing these bodies—those of black, mixed-race, and lesbian women in particular—as sources of intensely regionalized knowledge and memory legitimizes the kind of subjective histories from which these poets appear to draw while also establishing a tradition of multiplicity in narrative. Tracing memory’s evolution and preservation in marginalized bodies also casts them as sources of collective memory capable of augmenting or dismantling the white patriarchal master narrative of Southern history.</p><p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10618383 |
| Date | 05 May 2018 |
| Creators | Kranz, Tova E. |
| Publisher | University of Louisiana at Lafayette |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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