Daughters of Time: Creating Woman's Voice in Southern Story | National Humanities Center

Work of the Fellows: Monographs

Daughters of Time: Creating Woman’s Voice in Southern Story

By Lucinda H. MacKethan (NHC Fellow, 1984–85)

Women Authors; American South; American Literature; Storytelling; Storytellers

Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990

From the publisher’s description:

Drawing upon letters, autobiographies, and novels, Daughters of Time examines the strategies that various southern women writers have used to create their own "voice," their own unique expression of mind and selfhood. Lucinda H. MacKethan shows that, despite the constraining and muting effects of the South's historically patriarchal society, the region has been graced by the remarkably strong presence of women storytellers, black and white, who have asserted their determination to become themselves through creative acts of voicing.

Within a chronological structure, MacKethan examines the letters of the plantation mistress Catherine Hammond; the memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs; the autobiographical writings of Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, as well as their novels Barren GroundTheir Eyes Were Watching God, and The Optimist's Daughter; and finally, Alice Walker's The Co

Subjects
Literature / Literary Criticism / Women Authors / American South / American Literature / Storytelling / Storytellers /

MacKethan, Lucinda H. (NHC Fellow, 1984–85). Daughters of Time: Creating Woman's Voice in Southern Story. Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.