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George Washington Cable, a Louisiana creole author who wrote during the U.S. South’s reconstruction period of the late 19th century, documented the diverse and complex cultural landscape of his native region in his body of work. He is best-known for his depiction of creole life in New Orleans, with his regional realist, local color writing and heavy use of the vernacular, but also as being a purveyor of civil rights and an abolitionist. He was also a devout gardener. In this seminar, we will read stories from Cable’s short story collection, Old Creole Days (1879), as well as excerpts from the novel The Grandissimes (1880), and from his gardening handbook, The Amateur Garden (1914). Here, we will encounter estates haunted by the ghosts of plantation owners, mansions swallowed by the Mississippi, magically blooming barren wastelands, siblings with the exact same name but different ‘races,’ mothers’ questionable claims to parenthood, the tyrannical nature of lawn-mowers, and more in order to explore Cable’s depiction of a shifting American cultural landscape in the enigmatic New Orleans. |
