Remembering Patricia Yaeger: A Written Roundtable

The field of literary studies lost one of its brightest lights when, on Jul 25, 2014, Patricia Yaeger died after a battle with ovarian cancer. While Patsy was a prominent scholar in many fields her influence in Southern studies was unparalleled. The author was in graduate school when Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990 first appeared in 2000; it was like a bomb had gone off in their discipline. Dirt and Desire was the first monograph he encountered that succeeded largely because of its style, one of elegant determinism: Patsy knew what she wanted to say, and tied into her rhetoric was a personal investment that touched many of them deeply. He knows her influence was felt so deeply in part because when she took to the usual avenues for grief all of those he spoke with felt this same tremendous sense of loss.