New Orleans A Literary History

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. This book provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives.

Preface T. R. Johnson; 1. Swamp City Anthony Wilson; 2. Mixed motives: writing for French audiences from colonial New Orleans Erin Greenwald; 3. 'As I have seen and known it': ex-slave autobiographers and the New Orleans Slave Market Calvin Schermerhorn; 4. What New Orleans Meant to Walt Whitman Ed Folsom; 5. Coloring sex, love, and desire in Creole New Orleans's long nineteenth century Jarrod Hayes; 6. The white Creole tradition: Alfred Mercier, Charles Gayarré, Adrien Rouquette, and Grace King Rien Fertel; 7. The Civil War's literary aftershocks: George Washington Cable Matthew Smith; 8. Illusion and disillusion: the making of Lafcadio Hearn S. Frederick Starr; 9. Local color, social problems, and the living dead in the late nineteenth-century short fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson Tara T. Green; 10. Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier, and the predicament of the intellectual woman in New Orleans Emily Toth; 11. Converging Americas: New Orleans in Spanish-language and Latina/o/x literary culture Kirsten Silva Greusz; 12. A Jazz origin-myth: Bras Coupe in history, folklore, and literature Bryan Wagner; 13. 'Stepping out' of the storyville frame: recent literary representations of the New Orleans red light district Milena Marinkova; 14. Louis Armstrong's autobiographical art Daniel Stein; 15. New Orleans, modernism, and The Double Dealer, 1921–1926 Thomas Bonner; 16. 'Because what else could he have hoped to find in New Orleans, if not the truth': William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Thadious Davis; 17. 'The place I was made for': Tennessee Williams in New Orleans Henry I. Schvey; 18. A Civil Rights era novel of the American Civil War: Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels William Bedford Clark; 19. How to survive the best environments: narrating Protean place in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer Richmond M. Eustis, Jr; 20. Tom Dent and the development of black literature in New Orleans Kalamu Ya Salaam; 21. The gothic tradition in New Orleans Taylor Hagood; 22. A Flaneur in the French Quarter and beyond: John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces Cory MacLauchlin; 23. Literary fiction by New Orleans women, 1961–2003: Shirley Anne Grau, Ellen Gilchrest, Sheila Bosworth, and Valerie Martin Monica Carol Miller; 24. Asian American New Orleans Marguerite Nguyen; 25. New Orleans rap and bounce: recovering and archiving an expressive tradition Holly Hobbs; 26. The literature of Hurricane Katrina Kevin Rabalais; Afterword: swan song? T. R. Johnson; Contributors biographies; Index.

T. R. Johnson is a Professor of English and Weiss Presidential Fellow at Tulane University, Louisiana. He has written books about Lacanian psychoanalysis, the teaching of writing, and about prose-style. He has also taught at Boston University and the University of Louisville.