The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

Meticulously researched and cogently argued, The Literature of Reconstruction offers a compelling account of the ways in which imaginative literature both commented on and informed discussions of the political, economic, and social arrangements of Reconstruction

The Curse of Caste; Or the Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel

An African-American Life in Contemporary Fiction A Lost Classic Much to the benefit of literary scholars and students of antebellum American culture, William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun have reissued Julia C. Collins\u27s The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, the earliest p...

Shame of the Southland: \u3cem\u3eViolence\u3c/em\u3e and the Selling of the Visceral South

The story of Violence—a novel that failed—tells us as much about the literary marketplace as the stories of those more familiar novels that came to dominate the national discourse about the problem South during the late-1920s and 1930s. It tells us about a crusading writing team -- socialist Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, son of Russian-Jewish émigrés, and his wife, Marcet, the niece of social reformer Jane Addams and herself a feminist -- that imagined it could reform the South through print; it tells us about a publisher’s fantasies of a region that had been exoticized for much of its history; and it tells us about the limits of a narrative strategy that sought to combine a reformist impulse with outlandish sensationalized content. Perhaps most importantly, Violence reminds us that a literary canon represents a small percentage of titles that were actually published. It thus encourages us to ask what we might find if we shift our gaze away from those works that command our attention to those titles that lived short and inconspicuous lives.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studythesouth/1012/thumbnail.jp

Panel. Books and Things

“Bookless Mississippi”: The Cultural Economy of Reading in the Depression-Era South / Sarah E. Gardner, Mercer UniversityThis paper examines the ways in which academics along with book industry insiders understood depressed rates of book buying and borrowing in the South. These were no idle concerns. During the 1930s, the south accounted for a little more than 7 percent of the nation’s book purchases. High rates of poverty and illiteracy accounted for much of the problem, but not all. Those with a vested interest in fostering “book consciousness” in the south, including Howard Odum, Louis Round Wilson, and William Couch, devised creative schemes to promote reading in the region. Not surprisingly, their efforts proved largely unsuccessful. As they quickly learned, those concerned solely with the bottom line were content to write the south off. The implications were considerable. As newspaper editor Jonathan Daniels ruefully observed, “books in the South, like cotton in the South, are produced for the export trade.”Flem Snopes Under the Material Spell: Reading Things in the Snopes Trilogy / Han Qiqun, Nanjing Forestry UniversityThis paper scrutinizes a manifold of systematically related things Flem Snopes possessed, bought and gave as gifts in the Snopes Trilogy, and especially explores the material powers of things in the formation of social identity and gender subjectivity of Flem. Flem, quasi-thing like under the material spell, is employed by William Faulkner to represent the dark side of the American Dream within the context of the transforming south, displaying an interactive relationship between the social changes and the southern citizens’ identity in the transitional period from the American new south to the modern south

Panel. History Makes Faulkner: Manufacturing a Mid-Century Reputation

Mr. Cowley\u27s Southern Saga: Cowley, Faulkner, and Canon-Building at Mid-Century / Sarah E. Gardner, Mercer UniversityMob Fury: Paperbacks and the Popular Politicization of Faulkner / David M. Earle, University of West FloridaReading Faulkner\u27s Readers: Reputation and Postwar Reading Revolution / Anna Creadick, Hobart and William Smith College

Child‐level factors affecting rate of learning to write in first grade

[EN] Background.Written composition requires handwriting, spelling, and text planning skills,all largely learned through school instruction. Students’ rate of learning to compose textin their first months at school will depend, in part, on their literacy-related abilities atschool start. These effects have not previously been explored.Aim.We aimed to establish the effects of various literacy-related abilities on thelearning trajectory of first-grade students as they are taught to write.Sample.179 Spanish first-grade students (94 female, mean age 6.1 years) writing 3,512texts.Method.Students were assessed at start of school for spelling, transcription fluency,letter knowledge, phonological awareness, handwriting accuracy, word reading, and non-verbal reasoning. They were then taught under a curriculum that included researcher-designed instruction in handwriting, spelling, and ideation. Students’ compositionperformance was probed at very regular intervals over their first 13 weeks at school.Results.Controlling for age, overall performance was predicted by spelling, transcrip-tion fluency, handwriting accuracy, word reading, and non-verbal reasoning. Moststudents showed rapid initial improvement, but then much slower learning. Weak spellers(and to a lesser extent less fluent hand-writers) showed weaker initial performance, butthen steady improvement across the study period.SIMinisterio de Economía y Competitivida

The Meaning of Death: Evolution and Ecology of Apoptosis in Protozoan Parasites

The discovery that an apoptosis-like, programmed cell death (PCD) occurs in a broad range of protozoan parasites offers novel therapeutic tools to treat some of the most serious infectious diseases of humans, companion animals, wildlife, and livestock. Whilst apoptosis is an essential part of normal development, maintenance, and defence in multicellular organisms, its occurrence in unicellular parasites appears counter-intuitive and has proved highly controversial: according to the Darwinian notion of “survival of the fittest”, parasites are expected to evolve strategies to maximise their proliferation, not death. The prevailing, and untested, opinion in the literature is that parasites employ apoptosis to “altruistically” self-regulate the intensity of infection in the host/vector. However, evolutionary theory tells us that at most, this can only be part of the explanation, and other non-mutually exclusive hypotheses must also be tested. Here, we explain the evolutionary concepts that can explain apoptosis in unicellular parasites, highlight the key questions, and outline the approaches required to resolve the controversy over whether parasites “commit suicide”. We highlight the need for integration of proximate and functional approaches into an evolutionary framework to understand apoptosis in unicellular parasites. Understanding how, when, and why parasites employ apoptosis is central to targeting this process with interventions that are sustainable in the face of parasite evolution

The role of emotion regulation for coping with school-based peer-victimisation in late childhood

The current research examined the role of two emotion regulation processes, cognitive reappraisal and emotion suppression, on maladaptive victimisation coping following school-based peer-victimisation in late childhood (n = 443). The relationship between emotion regulation and maladaptive coping was also tested for serial mediation effects, linking peer-victimisation and school loneliness. Results showed that poor emotion regulation in children was positively associated with maladaptive peer-victimisation coping. Moreover, the relationship between cognitive reappraisal and maladaptive coping was found to mediate the relationship between peer-victimisation experiences and school loneliness. These findings have implications for the development of school-based peer-victimisation intervention strategies that focus on improving children's emotional competencies

‘I’d rather you didn’t come’: The impact of stigma on exercising with epilepsy

Epilepsy is a common but hidden disorder, leading to stigma in everyday life. Despite stigma being widely researched, little is known about the impact of stigma for people with epilepsy within a sports and exercise setting. Using constructionist grounded theory, we explored the barriers and adaptations to exercise for people with epilepsy. Three focus groups (2-3 participants per group) and three semi-structured interviews were conducted (11 participants total). Stigma negatively impacted joining team sports, running groups, and disclosure to others. The effect of stigma was reduced by educating others about epilepsy, thus creating more awareness and understanding