Saturday, July 10, 2010

Another Toole study to add to Part I

In looking through my notes to finalize my latest publication, A Critical Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Scholarship on John Kennedy Toole, http://www.winona.edu/library/staff/vl/toole/Toole_obscure_scholarship.html, I discovered a Toole study which had slipped through when I was compiling the list of comparisons made between A Confederacy of Dunces and other literary works.

Here is the citation and the information:

Woodland, James R. "in that City Foreign and Paradoxical": The Idea of New Orleans in the Southern Literary Imagination (Louisiana). Diss. U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987.

As I wrote in the above bibliography,
Chapter Seven (302) discusses and compares Confederacy with Percy’s Moviegoer and Lancelot. Woodland cites Regan’s article comparing Moviegoer to Confederacy. Both Binx and Ignatius are in the culture but not of it (308, 325). In all three novels, insiders become outsiders. Woodland sees Ignatius Reilly as an native who is nevertheless an outsider like George Washington Cable’s Frowenfeld (325). Woodland also briefly compares Confederacy to Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (324, 326). He points out that in both, ethnic diversity is comforting rather than exotic, which ties in nicely to Lowe’s study of Confederacy’s relationship to ethnic melee comedy. He compares Ignatius’s outrage about the degeneracy of the French Quarter as being like Lance’s (327). In 1968, Percy wrote in an article in Harper's that the virtue of New Orleans was the talent for everyday life. Ignatius also finds in New Orleans a source of creature comforts, the hope of small things (328).

This study would be added to the section on Percy, the footnote on Tennessee Williams, and George Washington Cable would be added to the list of authors absent from the Toole Papers.

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