New Orleans

T. R. Johnson is a Professor of English and Weiss Presidential Fellow at Tulane University, Louisiana. He has written books about Lacanian psychoanalysis, the teaching of writing, and about prose-style. He has also taught at Boston University and the University of Louisville.

• Preface T. R. Johnson; 1. Swamp City Anthony Wilson; 2. Mixed motives: writing for French audiences from colonial New Orleans Erin Greenwald; 3. 'As I have seen and known it': ex-slave autobiographers and the New Orleans Slave Market Calvin Schermerhorn; 4. What New Orleans Meant to Walt Whitman Ed Folsom; 5. Coloring sex, love, and desire in Creole New Orleans's long nineteenth century Jarrod Hayes; 6. The white Creole tradition: Alfred Mercier, Charles Gayarré, Adrien Rouquette, and Grace King Rien Fertel; 7. The Civil War's literary aftershocks: George Washington Cable Matthew Smith; 8. Illusion and disillusion: the making of Lafcadio Hearn S. Frederick Starr; 9. Local color, social problems, and the living dead in the late nineteenth-century short fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson Tara T. Green; 10. Kate Chopin, Edna Pontellier, and the predicament of the intellectual woman in New Orleans Emily Toth; 11. Converging Americas: New Orleans in Spanish-language and Latina/o/x literary culture Kirsten Silva Greusz; 12. A Jazz origin-myth: Bras Coupe in history, folklore, and literature Bryan Wagner; 13. 'Stepping out' of the storyville frame: recent literary representations of the New Orleans red light district Milena Marinkova; 14. Louis Armstrong's autobiographical art Daniel Stein; 15. New Orleans, modernism, and The Double Dealer, 1921–1926 Thomas Bonner; 16. 'Because what else could he have hoped to find in New Orleans, if not the truth': William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Thadious Davis; 17. 'The place I was made for': Tennessee Williams in New Orleans Henry I. Schvey; 18. A Civil Rights era novel of the American Civil War: Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels William Bedford Clark; 19. How to survive the best environments: narrating Protean place in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer Richmond M. Eustis, Jr; 20. Tom Dent and the development of black literature in New Orleans Kalamu Ya Salaam; 21. The gothic tradition in New Orleans Taylor Hagood; 22. A Flaneur in the French Quarter and beyond: John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces Cory MacLauchlin; 23. Literary fiction by New Orleans women, 1961–2003: Shirley Anne Grau, Ellen Gilchrest, Sheila Bosworth, and Valerie Martin Monica Carol Miller; 24. Asian American New Orleans Marguerite Nguyen; 25. New Orleans rap and bounce: recovering and archiving an expressive tradition Holly Hobbs; 26. The literature of Hurricane Katrina Kevin Rabalais; Afterword: swan song? T. R. Johnson; Contributors biographies; Index.

'Anyone giving serious consideration to the writing of New Orleans must have this book. T. R. Johnson has brought together between these covers a stunning collection of essays that never fail to delight and occasionally shock. This book expertly captures the varied essence of the great city: its fatalism, its history, it magic.' Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of We Cast a Shadow