When Scarlett O’Hara fluttered her dark lashes, did she threaten only the gentleman in her parlor or the very culture that produced her? Examining the “bad belle” as a recurring character, The Belle Gone Bad finds that white southern women writers from the antebellum period to the present have used treacherous belles to subtly indict their culture from within. Combining the southern ideal of ladyhood with the sexual power of the dark seductress, the bad belle is the perfect figure with which to critique a culture that effectively enslaved both its white and black women. Betina Entzminger traces the development of the bad belle from nineteenth-century domestic novelist E.D.E.N. Southworth to contemporary novelist Kaye Gibbons. Coy and alluring like the traditional southern belle, the bad belle is also manipulative and knowing; the men subject to her cultivated charms often meet disastrous ends. By making the patriarch vulnerable to women who outwardly conform to the limiting conventions of womanhood but inwardly break all the rules, these writers challenged a society that stereotyped black women as promiscuous and forced white women onto pedestals while committing heinous acts in their name. Representations of the bad belle evolved along with southern society, and by the late twentieth century, many women writers expressed emancipation through the literal or figurative destruction of corrupt or would-be belles. The Belle Gone Bad shows that even writers who have been critically dismissed as too domestic or conservative to be innovative did—through the strategy of the bad belle character—challenge southern institutions and conceptions about race, class, and gender. What unites the dangerous belles created by several generations of women writing in the South, old and new, is their liberating potential.

"Sabine Starr's books pack a wallop!" —Carolyn Brown A Little Scandal. . . Belle Thompson will do just about anything to bring the murderer of her father and fiancé to justice. Even partner up with Mercy Huntingdon, a notorious artist known more for his scandalous sculptures than his skill with a six-shooter. But Belle and Mercy may have a common enemy, and if posing as his muse—a sensuous lady of the evening—will get Belle her man, the Texas beauty is up to the challenge. . . Might Do A Girl Good. . . Mercy Huntingdon needs Belle Thompson. Not only in his big, brass bed, but by his side as he tracks a kidnapper. Yet once he crosses into outlaw country with the gorgeous bounty hunter, all of his protective instincts go into overdrive—as well as a passion more powerful than the revenge that drives them both. . .. Praise For Sabine Starr "Sabine Starr's books pack a wallop! Featuring a rip-roaring cast of characters and smoking hot romance, they are head butting, heart stopping, sassy and sexy books that come to life in your hands—books that you don't want to end!" —Carolyn Brown, New York Times bestselling author "Starr writes a fun, vivid western romance with entertaining characters." —Publishers Weekly 62,000 Words

Evil. Women. The Feminine. The relationships that bring together these three ideas form the basis for the papers gathered together in this volume. By asking how, why, when, and to what purpose these three terms are often linked serves as the starting point of interrogation for each of the authors here considered.

HE'S HUNTING FOR GOLD. . . Not many people can keep a secret from Lucky Devereaux. He's a triple threat of outlaw, treasure hunter, and Native American mystic. But something in Tempest Templeton's beautiful, heartbroken eyes intrigues him, and he's determined to unravel the mystery. . . SHE'S HUNTING FOR A MAN. . . Tempest has to remind herself that handsome men like Lucky bring only pain. She learned that when her groom ran off before the wedding night—taking her family's money with him. Now she's hunting him down. But a lady alone in Indian Territory is asking for trouble, and Lucky promises he's just the man to keep her safe and show her everything she's been missing. . . PRAISE FOR SABINE STARR'S LADY GONE BAD "A fun read—Old West style!" –USAToday.com "An exciting read!"— New York Times bestselling author Bobbi Smith "If you're a fan of sexy cowboys, mysterious outlaws, historical settings, and HAWT romance— definitely grab this one up." —JenRen's Review "Readers will enjoy. . .Lady Gone Bad." —Genre Go Round Reviews "This book is perfect for a romance reader." —Nocturne Romance Reads "One of the best historicals of the year!" —Melissa's Mochas, Mysteries & More Review

Este libro analiza la manera con la que Lee Smith ha dado voz a todos los aspectos de su experiencia tanto como mujer-artista que vive en la América contemporánea como nativa de la Appalachia, una región sureña que todavía conserva un fuerte sentimiento de la tradición oral y de vínculos con la comunidad. Smith revisa y altera el lenguaje y los mitos que han condicionado sus búsquedas de la identidad y han silenciado sus voces. Al realizarlo, explora la relación entre el heroísmo femenino y la creatividad de las mujeres como algo distinto a la de los hombres. En su lucha, las heroínas de Smith reflejan el desarrollo personal y artístico de la escritora. La relación conflictiva de sus personajes femeninos con la auto-afirmación y con el mundo de la Appalachia revela los propios sentimientos ambivalentes de Smith hacia el concepto de individualidad y hacia sus raíces culturales.

This collection of essays provides new insights into the theme of inheritance in American women’s writing, ranging from Emily Dickinson’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s legacy to Meredith Sue Willis’s exploration of the tension between material inheritance and spiritual heritage in the Appalachian context. Using diverse critical and theoretical models, the twelve contributors examine women’s problematic relationship to inheritance in a variety of historical, geographical, and personal contexts, bringing to the fore a number of strategies of resistance and empowerment that have helped women cope with the burden or the lack of any inheritance through the centuries. Grouped into four sections, these essays successively investigate women’s attempts to grapple with the curse of personal or national inheritance, the troubled relationship with the father figure, the classic trope of the haunted, Gothic house, and the plight of more contemporary women writers who have been relegated to the dead zone of American literary inheritance. Of crucial importance for all of these writers is the tension between the home and the land, as well as a questioning of intertextuality as the starting-point for a reconfiguration of the self in its relationship with the past.

The Romance of Regionalism in the Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: The South Side of Paradise explores resonances of "Southernness" in works by American culture’s leading literary couple. At the height of their fame, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald dramatized their relationship as a romance of regionalism, as the charming tale of a Northern man wooing a Southern belle. Their writing exposes deeper sectional conflicts, however: from the seemingly unexorcisable fixation with the Civil War and the historical revisionism of the Lost Cause to popular culture’s depiction of the South as an artistically deprived, economically broken backwater, the couple challenged early twentieth-century stereotypes of life below the Mason-Dixon line. From their most famous efforts (The Great Gatsby and Save Me the Waltz) to their more overlooked and obscure (Scott’s 1932 story “Family in the Wind,” Zelda’s “The Iceberg,” published in 1918 before she even met her husband), Scott and Zelda returned obsessively to the challenges of defining Southern identity in a country in which “going south” meant decay and dissolution. Contributors to this volume tackle a range of Southern topics, including belle culture, the picturesque and the Gothic, Confederate commemoration and race relations, and regional reconciliation. As the collection demonstrates, the Fitzgeralds’ fortuitous meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1918 sparked a Southern renascence in miniature.