Rowan Oak Outbuildings on the Mend

Restoration work is nearing completion on the four outbuildings at Rowan Oak, which was dedicated in 1993 as Mississippi's first National Literary Landmark. The City of Oxford agreed in 1992 to dedicate $211,000 in tourism tax monies to match a similar amount to be raised by the University for a total of $422,000, the estimated cost of the project.

Rowan Oak, which is owned by the University, draws thousands of visitors from around the world to Oxford and Lafayette County.

A recent luncheon in Washington, D.C., the main benefit of the National Committee for the Preservation of Rowan Oak, raised $126,000 for the project. Best selling author John Grisham of Oxford was the featured speaker at the luncheon. Before the luncheon, the campaign had already accumulated $85,000.

A major portion of the project includes the restoration of a barn and cook house, which were constructed about the same time the house was finished, in 1848; a servant's house, where Caroline Barr (immortalized as Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury) lived until her death; and the stable, where Faulkner spent many hours.

Additional projects relating to William Faulkner and his family are being pursued. The University of Mississippi Foundation has purchased Memory House, the historic home of John Faulkner, brother of William and a noted author and painter. Located on three acres adjacent to the campus on University Avenue, the home will house the Foundation's offices. The University Foundation is also working to preserve Greenfield Farm, William Faulkner's country home, northeast of Oxford.

Tina Hahn

The Civil War is an enduring issue for Americans defining their national identity. Scholars have produced thousands of books on the subject, and Ken Burns's phenomenally popular Public Broadcasting System documentary attests to the topic's continued appeal. Yet despite the level of interest in the Civil War, few sustained efforts have been made to examine its religious meaning.

The symposium will explore the causes and results of the war, the experiences of soldiers on the battlefield and men and women on the homefront, religious interpretations of the war's underlying significance, the role of slavery, and the relationship of ethnicity, race, and social class to war. Other papers will assess the contributions of ministers to the wartime crisis, religion's role in communications systems, and how religion's role in the American Civil War compared with that of other civil wars.

Historians and religious studies scholars will come together to offer their complementary perspectives in addressing these subjects. Speakers at the symposium will include Drew Gilpin Faust, Elizabeth FoxGenovese, George Fredrickson, Eugene D. Genovese, Robert Hall, Samuel S. Hill, Randall Miller, Reid Mitchell, Mark Noll, Phillip Shaw Paludan, Harry Stout, the Center's Charles Reagan Wilson, and Bertram Wyatt Brown.

The registration fee for the symposium will be $25 for students and members of Civil War Roundtables and $50 for others. Registration will be handled by Charles Brockwell at the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary (800-264-1839, extension 450, or 502-895-3411).

Keynote speaker Phillip Shaw Paludan_s words about Northerners in the sectional crisis hold truth for Southerners as well. While political issues, labor concerns, the constitutional system, and economic matters were important in the sectional crisis before the Civil War, "religion struck at matters of ultimate concern. It justified their accomplishments, explained their tragedies, consoled and inspired them." The symposium should illuminate this great American event through a sustained examination of the spiritual dimensions of its causes, dimensions, and results.

Author's Query

Eli Evans
One Lexington Avenue, Apt. 3-C
New York, NY 10010

Porter L. Fortune Jr. Symposium

Those delivering papers will include Raymond O. Arsenault, Paul K. Conkin, William J. Cooper, Lacy K. Ford, Manning Marable, and Robert C. McMath. Commentators will be Carol K. Bleser, Jimmie Lewis Franklin, Michael Perman, David M. Oshinsky, Patricia Sullivan, and George C. Wright.

The symposium is funded by the Mississippi Humanities Council and is sponsored by the Department of History and the Center.

For more information, please write or call the Department of History, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677; telephone 601-232-7148.

Also included are the extended remarks of two book industry experts: "A History of the Book Trade in the South" by Philip Maurice Pfeffer, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Ingram Distribution Group Inc., and "Censorship in the South and Beyond" by Oren J. Teicher, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and director of government affairs for the American Booksellers Association.

The volume also features discussions by two groups of panelists at the inaugural conference. "`Go, Little Book...': Getting a Book to Readers" includes commentary from novelist Larry Brown, agent Liz Darhansoff, bookseller Richard Howorth, editor Shannon Ravenel, and marketing director Ina Stern. Addressing another topic, "The Paris Review at Forty," are managing editor James Linville, editor at large Jeanne McCulloch, and founding editor George Plimpton.

Included as well in the Winter 1993/94 issue is "Zeno's Arrow: Or the Reason the Oft Described Distribution Problem of the Book Trade Remains Insoluble," an article by Richard Abel, director and publisher of University Press of Mississippi.

Copies of the volume may be ordered from the Center for $12 per issue, plus shipping and handling. Friends of the Center discount applies. To place an order, phone 601-232-5577, or write Southern Culture Catalog, Hill Hall, Room 309, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677.

Jordan Wins Bancroft Prize

Jordan also has won the National University Press Book Award for the best book in the humanities published by a university press in 1993.

Tumult and Silence at Second Creek is an account of a conspiracy by plantation slaves to organize a large scale revolt in Adams County, Miss., at the beginning of the Civil War and the illegal actions of the committee that investigated the incident and hanged the conspirators.

This is the second time Jordan has won the Bancroft Prize. The first time was in 1969 and was for his book White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550 1812.

Notes on Contributors

Wesley Loy received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and has worked as a reporter at the Orlando Sentinel and the Anchorage Daily News. Working toward his master's in Southern Studies at Ole Miss, this fall he will study Russian in Nalchik on a University sponsored exchange.

David Sansing retired from his position as professor of History at the University of Mississippi at the end of 1993. His many publications include Mississippi, 1540 to the Present; Mississippi, Its People and Culture; and Making Haste Slowly: The Troubled History of Higher Education in Mississippi.

Cynthia Shearer has published fiction in The Quarterly, Ladies' Home Journal, Tri-Quarterly, Missouri Review, and the Oxford American and is completing her first novel. She works for the Center and is curator of William Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak.

Chuck Yarborough received his undergraduate education at Vanderbilt University and has worked as an English teacher and football coach at Holy Cross High School in New Orleans and as a stockbroker in San Francisco. A graduate student in the Southern Studies program, he spent the past academic year as a folklife researcher for the Center's Ichauway Documentary Project in Baker County, Ga..

McCrady Posters and Videos

John McCrady was born in Canton,Miss., and lived in Oxford in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He attended the University of Mississippi, studied art in New Orleans and New York, and during the Depression worked for the WPA's Federal Art Project. Later, in 1942, he founded the John McCrady Art School of New Orleans and served as its director and instructor until his death in 1968.

Oxford and its surrounding countryside provided a major source of artistic inspiration for McCrady throughout his life. Political Rally, set on the town's square, depicts a campaign gathering for demagogic politician Theodore Bilbo. Standing to the right, at the edge of the crowd, is William Faulkner; beside him are the painter and his wife, Mary.

John McCrady's Southern Scene, a 30-minute documentary on the life and times of the artist, will be shown on the campus television station during the conference. Matthew J. Martinez produced the documentary in association with WYES and Choupique Productions of New Orleans and with grant support from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

Copies of the McCrady video and the 1994 conference poster illustrated with his painting are available through the Center's Southern Culture Catalog. Conference posters with illustrations by Glennray Tutor-"Faulkner and Religion" (1989), "Faulkner and the Short Story" (1990), "Faulkner and Psychology" (1991), "Faulkner and Ideology" (1992), and "Faulkner and the Artist" (1993), are also available. Videos are $50.00 each and posters are $10.00 each, plus postage and handling. For additional information or to place an order, call 601-232-5577.

DEBORAH CLARKE, assistant professor of English and Women's Studies, Pennsylvania State University; author of Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner and essays on Faulkner, Camus, and Toni Morrison.

ANDREA DIMINO, assistant professor of Literature, New College of the University of South Florida; author of essays and conference papers on Faulkner and a book-length manuscript, "Faulkner's Hunt for the Present: Reading Faulknerian Time."

JOHN N. DUVALL, associate professor of English, University of Memphis; author of Faulkner's Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities and several essays on American writers such as Faulkner, James, Eliot, and Morrison.

DOREEN FOWLER, professor of English, University of Mississippi; author of Faulkner's Changing Vision: From Outrage to Affirmation and numerous essays on Faulkner.

MINROSE GWIN, professor of English, University of New Mexico; author of Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature and The Feminine and Faulkner: Reading (Beyond) Sexual Difference.

MICHAEL E. LAHEY, doctoral candidate at the University of Alberta; author of essays on Faulkner in Women's Studies, Journal of the Short Story in English, Mississippi Quarterly, and a forthcoming Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference volume.

PETER PALIEVSKY, vice director, Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow; Fulbright scholar, University of Mississippi, 1994; author of three books and dozens of articles on a range of topics, primarily dealing with Russian classics, comparative literature, and Russian-American literary ties.

ROBERT DALE PARKER, professor of English, University of Illinois; author of Faulkner and the Novelistic Imagination and "Absalom, Absalom!": The Questioning of Fictions.

JAMES R. POLCHIN, recipient of M.A. degrees in literature from Drew University and American University; doctoral student at New York University beginning in the fall of 1994.

NOEL POLK, professor of English, University of Southern Mississippi; editor of the corrected texts of Faulkner's works and author of many essays on Faulkner and William Faulkner's "Requiem for a Nun": A Critical Study.

DAVID ROGERS, associate lecturer in literature, Kingston University; author of a dissertation titled "Articulating the Flesh: The Paradox of Form and Gender in the Novels of William Faulkner" and essays on Faulkner published in Mississippi Quarterly and Discourses on Slavery: Aphra Benn to Toni Morrison.

JOSEPH R. URGO, associate professor of English and Humanities, Bryant College; author of Faulkner's Apocrypha: "A Fable," Snopes, and the Spirit of Human Rebellion and Novel Frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American Culture.

PHILIP WEINSTEIN, professor of English, Swarthmore College; author of Henry James and the Requirements of the Imagination, The Semantics of Desire: Changing Modes of Identity, and Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns.

PATRICIA YAEGER, associate professor of English, University of Michigan; author of Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing and coeditor of Nationalisms and Sexualities and Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy.