Dreamworlds of Alabama

By Allen Shelton

Book Overview

"I speak in what others often hear as a strange accent. My past can't be located. I live in Buffalo, New York, an exile from the South. But these aren't Yankee dreams, even though my past seems like a fabrication, a dreamworld in which I'm a paper character and not a historical participant, with scars from barbed wire ripping under the pressure and flying through the air like a swarm of bees, or a horse rearing up and banging its head into mine from within, exploding my forehead." --from the Preface

Wisteria draped on a soldier's coffin, sent home to Alabama from a Virginia battlefield. The oldest standing house in the county, painted gray and flanked by a pecan orchard. A black steel fence tool, now perched atop a pile of books like a prehistoric bird of prey. In Dreamworlds of Alabama, Allen Shelton explores physical, historical, and social landscapes of northeastern Alabama. His homeplace near the Appalachian foothills provides the setting for a rich examination of cultural practices, a place where the language of place and things resonates with as much vitality and emotional urgency as the language of humans.

Throughout the book, Shelton demonstrates how deeply culture is inscribed in the land and in the most intimate spaces of the person--places of belonging and loss, insight and memory.

Born and raised in Jacksonville, Alabama, Allen Shelton is associate professor of sociology at Buffalo State College.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816650349
• ISBN13: 9780816650347
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

More powerful than a book probably ought to be...

This is a stunningly beautiful book. Allen Shelton's prose is tremendous - richly textured sentences packed with almost too much imagery, metaphor and pain to process. In his rawest, most powerful moments, Shelton overwhelms you, a dizzying barrage of lightning-fast slaps across the face - one side, then the next, then back again - leaving you desperate for the smallest chance to catch your breath and surrendering to the intensity nonetheless. There are many, many of these moments, but the book stops just short of relentless emotional assault. You emerge deeply affected, but uninjured. You can catch your breath, every once in a while (particularly if you don't know the work of Proust or Walter Benajmin) but you are never quite released.