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Elizabeth Evans (essay date 2000)

SOURCE: “Doris Betts's ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’: Miscegenation as Theme; Donne and Yeats as Allusive Sources,” in The South Carolina Review, Vol. 32, No. 2, Spring, 2000, pp. 163–70.

[In the following essay, Evans considers the theme of miscegenation in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and discusses the significance of references to the work of W. B. Yeats and John Donne in the story.]

I

“Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the title story of Doris Betts's third collection, first appeared in the Spring 1973 issue of the Carolina Quarterly; the story, however, was completed much earlier as a letter, dated 25 October 1969, shows. Betts wrote her close friend Louise Hardeman Abbot that she had been advised to publish a new story “under a pseudonym … because it's a white woman and a black man.”¹ The story was “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” While miscegenation...

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1. Introduction
2. Criticism
   1. Evelyn Eaton (review date 1954)
   2. Virginia Quarterly Review (review date 1966)
   3. James E. Poindexter (review date 1974)
   4. Elizabeth Evans (essay date 1975)
   5. David Marion Holman (essay date 1982)
   6. Michael McFee (essay date 1991)
   7. Doris Betts with Elizabeth Evans (interview date 1994)
   8. Doris Betts with W. Dale Brown (interview date 1996)
   9. Elizabeth Evans (essay date 1997)
   10. John Lang (essay date 1998)
   11. Elizabeth Evans (essay date 2000)
3. Further Reading
4. Copyright