Dreamworlds of Alabama

<div> <p>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</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Born and raised in Jacksonville Alabama Allen Shelton is associate professor of sociology at Buffalo State College.</p> </div>