Brannon Costello's Books

Plantation Airs

Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction, 1945--1971

By: Brannon Costello

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Plantation Airs

Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction, 1945--1971

By: Brannon Costello

In Plantation Airs, Brannon Costello argues persuasively for new attention to the often neglected issue of class in southern literary studies. Focusing on the relationship between racial paternalism and social class in American novels written after World War II, Costello asserts that well into the twentieth century, attitudes and behaviors associated with an idealized version of agrarian antebellum aristocracy -- especially, those of racial paternalism -- were believed to be essential for white southerners. The wealthy employed them to validate their identities as "aristocrats," while less-affluent whites used them to separate themselves from "white trash" in the social hierarchy. Even those who were not legitimate heirs of plantation-owning families found that "putting on airs" associated with the legacy of the plantation could align them with the forces of power and privilege and offer them a measure of authority in the public arena that they might otherwise lack. Fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Ernest Gaines, Walker Percy, and others reveals, however, that the racial paternalism central to class formation and mobility in the South was unraveling in the years after World War II, when the civil rights movement and the South's increasing industrialization dramatically altered southern life. Costello demonstrates that these writers were keenly aware of the ways in which the changes sweeping the South complicated the deeply embedded structures that governed the relationship between race and class. He further contends that the collapse of racial paternalism as a means of organizing class lies at the heart of their most important works -- including Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and her essay "The 'Pet Negro' System," Welty's Delta Wedding and The Ponder Heart, Faulkner's The Mansion and The Reivers, Gaines's Of Love and Dust and his story "Bloodline," and Percy's The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins. By examining ways in which these works depict and critique the fall of the plantation ideal and its aftermath, Plantation Airs indicates the richness and complexity of the literary responses to this intersection of race and class. Understanding how many of the modern South's best writers imagined and engaged the various facets of racial paternalism in their fiction, Costello confirms, helps readers construct a more comprehensive picture of the complications and contradictions of class in the South.

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Page Count

291

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807144924

ISBN 13

9780807144923

Neon Visions

The Comics of Howard Chaykin

By: Brannon Costello

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Neon Visions

The Comics of Howard Chaykin

By: Brannon Costello

In the 1980s, Howard Chaykin broke new ground in American comic books with a series of formally innovative, iconoclastic works that turned the traditional action-adventure tales of mainstream comics into a platform for personal expression, political engagement, and aesthetic experimentation. His original creations American Flagg!, Time2, and the notorious Black Kiss, along with his reshaping of familiar titles like The Shadow and Blackhawk, generated acclaim and often controversy as they challenged expectations of the visual design and subject matter permissible in popular comics. Today, Chaykin remains a vital and prolific artist, but despite the original and influential nature of his work, he receives scant critical attention. In Neon Visions, Brannon Costello offers the first book-length critical evaluation of Chaykin’s work and confronts the blind spots in comics scholarship that consign this seminal artist to the margins. He argues that Chaykin’s contributions are often overlooked because his comics eschew any pretensions to serious literature. Instead, Chaykin’s work revels in the cliffhanger thrills of heroic-adventure genres and courts outrage with transgressive depictions of violence and sexuality. Examining Chaykin’s career from his early successes to compelling contemporary series such as City of Tomorrow, Dominic Fortune, and the controversial Black Kiss 2, Costello explores how this inventive body of work, through its evolving treatment of the theme of authenticity, incisively investigates popular culture’s capacity to foster or constrain individual identity and political agency. Challenging prevailing assumptions about the types of comics deemed worthy of scholarly attention, Costello reveals that the work of an artist as distinctive as Howard Chaykin demands a nuanced reading—one that confronts his unique approach to the comics medium, his blending of autobiographical themes and genre trademarks, and his engagement with comic books as artifacts of consumer culture.

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Page Count

486

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807168076

ISBN 13

9780807168073

Neon Visions

The Comics of Howard Chaykin

By: Brannon Costello

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Neon Visions

The Comics of Howard Chaykin

By: Brannon Costello

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Page Count

486

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807168076

ISBN 13

9780807168073

The Scandal of Sacramentality

The Eucharist in Literary and Theological Perspectives

By: Brannon Hancock

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The Scandal of Sacramentality

The Eucharist in Literary and Theological Perspectives

By: Brannon Hancock

The sacrament par excellence, the Eucharist, has been upheld as the foundational sacrament of Christ's Body called Church, yet it has confounded Christian thinking and practice throughout history. Its symbolism points to the paradox of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of God in Jesus of Nazareth, which St. Paul describes as a stumbling-block (skandalon). Yet the scandal of sacramentality, not only illustrated by but enacted in the Eucharist, has not been sufficiently accounted for in the ecclesiologies and sacramental theologies of the Christian tradition. Despite what appears to be an increasingly post-ecclesial world, sacrament remains a persistent theme in contemporary culture, often in places least expected. Drawing upon the biblical image of "the Word made flesh," this interdisciplinary study examines the scandal of sacramentality along the twofold thematic of the scandal of language (word) and the scandal of the body (flesh). While sacred theology can think through this scandal only at significant risk to its own stability, the fictional discourses of literature and the arts are free to explore this scandal in a manner that simultaneously augments and challenges traditional notions of sacrament and sacramentality, and by extension, what it means to describe the Church as a "eucharistic community.

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Page Count

226

Publisher

Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published Date

ISBN 10

1630871400

ISBN 13

9781630871406

Who Reads Ulysses?

The Common Reader and the Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars

By: Julie Sloan Brannon

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Who Reads Ulysses?

The Common Reader and the Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars

By: Julie Sloan Brannon

Julie Sloan Brannon examines the Joyce Wars as a fascinating nexus of the conflicts between scholars and ordinary readers, and one that illuminates the existence of ulysses-and by extension, Joyce-as an example of Lyotard's differend, an icon that exists simultaneously in two separate yet contradictory discourses, each of which silences the other. The Academic Joyce is radically different from the Public Joyce, and yet neither could exist independently. Tangled up in this conflicted space are the interests of the common reader, a nebulously defined entity, and the continuing controversies illustrate the strange relationship between academics, readers, and editors. Who Reads Ulysses? calls for us to look not only at questions of authorship raised by editorial theory, but to look carefully at who reads ulysses-and why they read it. This volume provides fruitful ways to explore the subversive nature of text for readers, both in and out of the academy.

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Page Count

222

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1136711341

ISBN 13

9781136711343

Plantation Airs

Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction, 1945--1971

By: Brannon Costello

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Plantation Airs

Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction, 1945--1971

By: Brannon Costello

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Age

Page Count

216

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807135240

ISBN 13

9780807135242

Book's by Brannon Costello

Plantation Airs

Plantation Airs

Neon Visions

Neon Visions

Neon Visions

Neon Visions

The Scandal of Sacramentality

The Scandal of Sacramentality

Who Reads Ulysses?

Who Reads Ulysses?

Plantation Airs

Plantation Airs

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