Contents

• "Last call to the West": Richard Wright’s The color curtain
• James Agee’s quest for forgiveness in Let us now praise famous men
• James Agee’s fashioning of guilt: The morning watch
• Ernest J. Gaines’s ideal of community in A gathering of old men
• A meditation on history and ethics: Ernest J. Gaines’s A lesson before dying
• Henry Roth’s narratives of captivity
• Physical disability and the sacramental community in Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that rises must converge
• Race, class, and redemption in Walker Percy’s The last gentleman
• The risks of membership: Richard Ford’s The sportswriter
• Representing the subaltern figure in William Styron’s The confessions of Nat Turner and Thomas Keneally’s The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
• Obligations of the dispossessed: the ethical vision of Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster and A virtuous woman
• Language and cultural authority in Toni Morrison’s Jazz