Dirt and desire reconstructing southern women's writing, 1930-1990 - Yaeger, Patricia (University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Includes bibliographical references (pages 301-312) and index
Chapter Nine Studying the Wafflehouse Chain, or Dirt as Desire in Their Eyes Were Watching GodNotes; References; Index
The story of southern writing--the Dixie Limited, if you will--runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture. For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and