Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
Not Just Whistling “Dixie”: The Civil War’s Legacy in Ron Rash’s *World Made Straight*
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Appalachian poet and fiction-writer Ron Rash is emerging as an international literary superstar. Of his Nothing Gold Can Stay (2014), Irish novelist Edna O’Brien declares, “Like his great predecessors, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and especially Eudora Welty, Ron Rash’s stories are rooted in the American South and from that place and those people, he writes marvelously rich and compelling vignettes of life as he has seen and imagined it.” Discussing efforts to make his characters relatable to readers outside the region, Rash noted in July, “One thing that has pleased me is that my books are in, I think, eighteen languages now. I just got an e-mail from China, that the books are doing very well there, and the editor there was talking about the number of young Chinese writers who are reading [my work]…. I was in France a few years ago, and a woman said, “You’ve told the story of my life” (interview with the author). Readers overseas and here at home just now boarding the Rash bandwagon will find plenty to ponder in even his early work. His writing has gathered literary power over time, but his nearly ten-year-old novel The World Made Straight demands attention now. As hair-raising as any best-selling thriller, TWMS transcends the pulp fiction genre to challenge readers to reconsider our perceptions of last summer’s Confederate flag debate as well as to reflect on the ways our cultural and personal histories can control us—or challenge us to overcome them.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Martha Greene Eads grew up in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge mountains and studied literature and theology at Wake Forest University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Durham (UK). A professor of English at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA, she has published on twentieth- and twenty-first-century drama, English modernism, and contemporary Southern fiction in Appalachian Journal, The Carolina Quarterly, Christianity and Literature, The Cresset, Modern Drama, The Southern Quarterly, and Theology.
Not Just Whistling “Dixie”: The Civil War’s Legacy in Ron Rash’s *World Made Straight*
Appalachian poet and fiction-writer Ron Rash is emerging as an international literary superstar. Of his Nothing Gold Can Stay (2014), Irish novelist Edna O’Brien declares, “Like his great predecessors, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and especially Eudora Welty, Ron Rash’s stories are rooted in the American South and from that place and those people, he writes marvelously rich and compelling vignettes of life as he has seen and imagined it.” Discussing efforts to make his characters relatable to readers outside the region, Rash noted in July, “One thing that has pleased me is that my books are in, I think, eighteen languages now. I just got an e-mail from China, that the books are doing very well there, and the editor there was talking about the number of young Chinese writers who are reading [my work]…. I was in France a few years ago, and a woman said, “You’ve told the story of my life” (interview with the author). Readers overseas and here at home just now boarding the Rash bandwagon will find plenty to ponder in even his early work. His writing has gathered literary power over time, but his nearly ten-year-old novel The World Made Straight demands attention now. As hair-raising as any best-selling thriller, TWMS transcends the pulp fiction genre to challenge readers to reconsider our perceptions of last summer’s Confederate flag debate as well as to reflect on the ways our cultural and personal histories can control us—or challenge us to overcome them.
