Charleston’s foodways, language, folklore, art, architecture, and history all reveal connections to the Caribbean that shaped not only the city itself, but the entire South as a region and the U.S. as a nation as well.
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Blind Hills and Tar Pits:
The Swamps of Folklore in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby
By employing strands of existing and original folklore in the novel, Morrison depicts multiple ways in which her characters become trapped and freed, as well as how and whether they succeed in so freeing themselves.
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Mark Twain and the Folklore of Day and Night
A look at two parallel ways Twain uses folklore and superstition in his works, and what this split says about the author himself.
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Constellation
It was a sound he might have heard any night on the edge of the woods, machete in hand, bent from cutting bamboo from the slope beyond the highway…
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‘Fighting the Long Defeat’ : Nature and Grief in Tolkien and Medieval Poetry
Especially in The Lord of the Rings, medieval ideas of nature — from its decline and hostility to culture, to its own suffering alongside us — color Tolkien’s writing, where they ultimately develop into a reconciliation between wilderness and hearth…
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People of Sand and Waves
I spit — salt on my lips, thick on my tongue, and sand, and something worse…
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The Marsh Ghost
Drew climbs out of the truck and whistles as heat blankets him…
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