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Walker Percy's Feminine Characters

WHITSTON PRESS

Lewis A. Lawson and Elzbieta Oleksy, Editors

— Lewis Lawson's Following Percy reflects more than twenty years of one intelligent reader's study of Percy's faith, fiction, and philosophy &mdash: a preoccupation perhaps to be expected in view of Lawson's previously demonstrated interest in Southern history, religion, and existentialism. Lawson has the ear of the best scholars in the field, and his essays are universally recognized for their learned readings of Percy. — Mississippi Quarterly

 

Once again — through his intelligent co-editing and his enlightening essay — Lewis Lawson shows his expertise in the study of Walker Percy. From the very beginning of his six-novel career, Walker Percy was criticized by some readers for his treatment of female characters. In this volume Professors Lawson and Oleksy provide a short introduction tracing this criticism, which occurred mostly in book reviews. Then follow essays by various hands treating the feminine character in Percy's novels.

Lewis Lawson, University of Maryland, begins the collection with an essay on The Moviegoer. Treating subsequent novels are other essayists: Elzbieta Oleksy, University of Lodz, Poland; Doreen Fowler, University of Mississippi, and Susan Donaldson, College of William and Mary, both widely published writers in Southern and feminist literary criticism; Anneke Leenhouts, a Dutch scholar frequently published in Europe; and Shelley Jackson, Ann Walker, and Timothy Nixon, younger scholars and essay and review to their credit.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. The Dream Screen in The Moviegoer – Lewis A. Lawson
  3. Gesture and Style in – Emory Elliott
  4. The Exclusionary Nature of The Moviegoer – Timothy K. Nixon
  5. Keeping Quentin Compson Alive: The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming, and the Problem of Masculinity – Susan V. Donaldson
  6. 'The Cave... the Fence': A Lacanian Reading of Walker Percy's The Second Coming – Doreen Fowler
  7. The Privilege of Maternity: Teaching Language and Love in The Second Coming – Shelley M. Jackson
  8. Rereading Allison Huger: Making Silence Signify in The Second Coming – Elinor Ann Walker
  9. A Gentleness with Women: Loving, Caring, and Sexual Dilemmas in Walker Percy's Fiction – Anneke Leenhouts
  10. From Silence and Madness to the Exchange that Multiplies: Walker Percy and the Woman Question – Elzbieta H. Oleksy

About the Editors
Lewis A. Lawson is a professor English at the University of Maryland at College Park. He has published three books on Walker Percy, incuding Walker Percy: Conversations with Walker Percy (1985), Following Percy (1988), and More Conversations with Walker Percy (1993).

Elzbieta Oleksy is Director of Women's Studies at the University of Lodz, Poland. She recently authored Plight in Common: Hawthorne and Percy.

Publication Date: 1995

Pages: 141