Southern United States literature
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Southern United States literature consists of American literature written about the Southern United States or by writers from the region. Literature written about the American South first began during the colonial era, and developed significantly during and after the period of slavery in the United States. Traditional historiography of Southern United States literature emphasized a unifying history of the region; the significance of family in the South's culture, a sense of community and the role of the individual, justice, the dominance of Christianity and the positive and negative impacts of religion, racial tensions, social class and the usage of local dialects.[1][2][3] However, in recent decades, the scholarship of the New Southern Studies has decentralized these conventional tropes in favor of a more geographically, politically, and ideologically expansive "South" or "Souths".[4]
Overview
In its simplest form, Southern literature consists of writing about the American South. Often, "the South" is defined, for historical as well as geographical reasons, as the states of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia and Arkansas.[5] Pre-Civil War definitions of the South often included Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware as well. However, "the South" is also a social, political, economic, and cultural construct that transcends these geographical boundaries.[6]
Southern literature has been described by scholars as occupying a liminal space within wider American culture.[4] After the American Revolution, writers in the U.S. from outside the South frequently othered Southern culture, in particular slavery, as a method of "[standing] apart from the imperial world order".[6] These negative portrayals of the American South eventually diminished after the abolition of slavery in the U.S., particularly during a period after the Spanish–American War when many Americans began to re-evaluate their anti-imperialistic views and support for imperialism grew. Changing historiographical trends have placed racism in the American South as emblematic of, rather than an exception to, U.S. racism as a whole.[4][7]
In addition to the geographical component of Southern literature, certain themes have appeared because of the similar histories of the Southern states in regard to American slavery, the
Despite these common themes, there is debate as to what makes a literary work "Southern." For example,
History
Early and antebellum literature
The earliest literature written in what would become the American South dates back to the colonial era, in particular Virginia; the explorer John Smith wrote an account of the founding of the colonial settlement of Jamestown in the early 17th century, while planter William Byrd II kept a diary of his day-to-day affairs during the early 18th century. Both sets of recollections are critical documents in early Southern history.
After the
Simms was a particularly significant figure, perhaps the most prominent Southern author before the
In Virginia, George Tucker produced in 1824 the first fiction of Virginia colonial life with The Valley of Shenandoah. He followed in 1827 with one of the country's first science fictions, A Voyage to the Moon: With Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians. Tucker was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Virginia. In 1836 Tucker published the first comprehensive biography of Thomas Jefferson - The Life of Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States.[11] Some critics also regard Poe as a Southern author—he was raised in Richmond, attended the University of Virginia, and edited the Southern Literary Messenger from 1835 to 1837. Yet in his poetry and fiction Poe rarely took up distinctly Southern themes or subjects; his status as a "Southern" writer remains ambiguous.
In the Chesapeake region, meanwhile, antebellum authors of enduring interest include
Not all noteworthy Southern authors during this period were white.
The "Lost Cause" years
In the second half of the 19th century, the South lost the Civil War and suffered through what many white Southerners considered a harsh occupation (called
in 1856 George Tucker completed his final multivolume work in his History of the United States, From Their Colonization to the End of the 26th Congress, in 1841.
In 1884,
During the first half of the 20th century, the lawyer, politician, minister, orator, actor, and author
The Southern Renaissance
In the 1920s and 1930s, a renaissance in Southern literature began with the appearance of writers such as
The late 1930s also saw the publication of one of the best-known Southern novels, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. The novel, published in 1936, quickly became a bestseller. It won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize, and in 1939 an equally famous movie of the novel premiered. In the eyes of some modern scholars, Mitchell's novel consolidated white supremacist Lost Cause ideologies (see Lost Cause of the Confederacy) to construct a bucolic plantation South in which slavery was a benign, or even benevolent, institution. Under this view, she presents white southerners as victims of a rapacious Northern industrial capitalism and depicts black southerners as either lazy, stupid, and over sexualized, or as docile, childlike, and resolutely loyal to their white masters. Southern literature has always drawn audiences outside the South and outside the United States, and Gone with the Wind has continued to popularize harmful stereotypes of southern history and culture for audiences around the world.[13] Despite this criticism, Gone with the Wind has enjoyed an enduring legacy as the most popular American novel ever written, an incredible achievement for a female writer. Since publication, Gone with the Wind has become a staple in many Southern homes.
Post World War II Southern literature
Southern literature following the Second World War grew thematically as it embraced the social and cultural changes in the South resulting from the
Southern poetry bloomed in the decades following the Second World War in large part thanks to the writing and efforts of Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey. Where earlier work primarily championed a white, agrarian past, the efforts of such poets as Dave Smith, Charles Wright, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jim Seay, Frank Stanford, Kate Daniels, James Applewhite, Betty Adcock, Rodney Jones, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey have opened up the subject matter and form of Southern poetry.[14]
Contemporary Southern literature
Today, in the early twenty-first century, the American South is undergoing a number of cultural and social changes, including rapid industrialization/
Selected journals
- Black Warrior Review — Published by University of Alabama
- Georgia Review— Published by University of Georgia
- Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts— Published at the University of Houston.
- Jabberwock Review — published by Mississippi State University
- Southern Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine — (1835–1837)
- University of the South)
- Southern Literary Journal — (1964–present)
- Mississippi Quarterly — A refereed, scholarly journal dedicated to the life and culture of the American South, past and present. [1]
- The Oxford American — A quarterly journal of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography, and music from and about the South.
- The Southern Review — The famous literary journal focusing on southern literature.
- storySouth — A journal of new writings from the American South. Features fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and more.
- Southern Cultures— Journal from the Center for the Study of the American South.
- Southern Spaces — Peer-Reviewed Internet journal examining the spaces and places of the American South.
Notable works
Around 2000 "the 'James Agee Film Project' conducted a poll of book editors, publishers, scholars and reviewers, asking which of the thousands of Southern prose works published during the past century should be considered 'the most remarkable works of modern Southern Literature." Results of the poll yielded the following titles:[21]
Title | Author | Year |
---|---|---|
Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | 1952 |
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men | James Agee | 1941 |
The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | 1929 |
Mind of the South | Wilbur Cash
|
1929 |
Look Homeward, Angel | Thomas Wolfe | 1929 |
To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | 1960 |
The Color Purple | Alice Walker | 1982 |
Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston | 1937 |
Absalom, Absalom! | William Faulkner | 1936 |
Lanterns on the Levee | William Alexander Percy | 1941 |
All the King's Men | Robert Penn Warren | 1946 |
Collected Stories | Eudora Welty | 1980 |
Civil War: A Narrative | Shelby Foote | 1958–1974 |
Moviegoer
|
Walker Percy | 1961 |
Tobacco Road | Erskine Caldwell | 1932 |
Black Boy | Richard Wright | 1945 |
Cane | Jean Toomer | 1923 |
Native Son | Richard Wright | 1940 |
As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner | 1930 |
Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | 1936 |
Up from Slavery | Booker T. Washington | 1901 |
Last Gentleman | Walker Percy | 1966 |
Complete Stories | Flannery O'Connor | 1971 |
Collected Stories | Katherine Anne Porter | 1965 |
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
|
Ernest J. Gaines | 1971 |
See also
- Literature of Southern states: Louisiana; Maryland; Mississippi, North Carolina; South Carolina; Tennessee; Texas; Virginia; West Virginia
- American literary regionalism
- Southern Gothic
- Fellowship of Southern Writers
- African-American literature
References
- ^ a b Patricia Evans."Southern Literature: Women Writers" Archived 2000-03-03 at archive.today. Accessed Feb. 4, 2007.
- ^ David Williamson. "UNC-CH surveys reveal where the 'real' South lies". Retrieved February 22, 2007.
- ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on August 9, 2007. Retrieved March 18, 2007.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ^ a b c Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn "Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies"
- ^ Joseph M. Flora & Lucinda H. MacKethan (eds.) The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs, Louisiana State University Press, 2001. These are the states as listed in this study.
- ^ a b Greeson, Jennifer. Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Harvard University Press.
- OCLC 709606332.
- ^ Kate Cochran. Review of Robert Brinkmeyer, Jr., Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West, University of Georgia Press, 2000.
- ^ Hobson 1999.
- ^ Michał Choiński, Southern Hyperboles: Metafigurative Strategies of Narration. Louisiana State University Press, 2020.
- ^ McLean, Robert C., George Tucker, Moral Philosopher and Man of Letters, University of North Carolina Press, 1961
- ^ "Thomas Dixon Jr". IMDb.
- )
- ^ Suarez 1999.
- ^ Mills 2000.
- OCLC 753978357.
- )
- )
- )
- )
- ^ "125 Great Southern Books". Riverdale, MD: Agee Films. Archived from the original on January 30, 2020. Retrieved March 12, 2017.
Bibliography
- Louise Manly (1895). Southern Literature from 1579-1895. Richmond: B.F. Johnson Publishing Company – via Project Gutenberg.
published in 20th c.
- Edwin Anderson Alderman; Joel Chandler Harris; Charles William Kent (eds.). Library of Southern Literature. Atlanta: Martin and Hoyt Company – via HathiTrust. 1909-1913 (16 volumes)
- Montrose Jonas Moses (1910). Literature of the South. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.
- Beatty, Richmond C.; Watkins, Floyd C.; Young, Thomas Daniel, eds. (1952). The Literature of the South. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company.
- Parks, Edd Winfield (1962). Ante-Bellum Southern Literary Critics. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
- Marion Montgomery, "The Sense of Violation: Notes toward a Definition of 'Southern' Fiction," The Georgia Review, 19 (1965)
- OCLC 859825215.
- Holman, C. Hugh; Rubin, Louis D. Jr.; Sullivan, Walter (1969). Southern Fiction: Renaissance and Beyond. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. OCLC 489993640.
- Flannery O'Connor, "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," in Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969)
- Davis, Richard Beale; Holman, C. Hugh; Rubin, Louis D. Jr. (1970). Southern Writing, 1585-1920. New York: Odyssey Press. OCLC 907422022.
- Holman, C. Hugh (1972). The Roots of Southern Writing. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. ISBN 9780820302904.
- Holman, C. Hugh; Rubin, Louis D. Jr. (1975). Southern Literary Study: Promise and Possibilities. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9780807812525.
- Holman, C. Hugh (1977). The Immoderate Past: The Southern Writer and History. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 9780820304199.
- Michael O'Brien (1979). The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0801840173
- Charles Reagan Wilson; William Ferris, eds. (1989). Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807818232.. Fulltext articles via the university's "Documenting the American South" website:
- The History of Southern Literature by Louis Rubin. Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
- Louis D. Rubin Jr., "From Combray to Ithaca; or, The 'Southernness' of Southern Literature," in The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree (Louisiana State University Press, 1991)
- Veronica Makowsky (1996), Walker Percy and Southern Literature (Explores the overall issues surrounding what makes for southern literature)
- Michael Kreyling (1998). Inventing Southern Literature. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-60473-776-9.
- Fred Hobson (1999). But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-4078-9.
- Ronald Lora; William Henry Longton, eds. (1999). "Southern Reviews, 1828-1880". Conservative Press in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-century America. Greenwood. pp. 147–282. ISBN 978-0-313-31043-0.
- Ernest Suarez (1999). Southbound: Interviews with Southern Poets. University of Missouri Press. ISBN 978-0-8262-6168-7.
- Richard J. Gray (2000). Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problem of Regionalism. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-2552-6.
- Jerry Leath Mills (2000). "The Dead Mule Rides Again". Southern Culture. 6 (4).. (Explanation of what constitutes "good" southern writing)
- Patricia Yeager (2000). Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226944913.
published in 21st c.
- Houston A. Baker (2001). Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822326953.
- Joseph M. Flora; Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, eds. (2001). Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs. ISBN 978-0-8071-2692-9.
- Where is the South in Today's Southern Literature? Article exploring 2002 changes in southern literature.
- The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition: What Every American Needs to Know Edited by James Trefil, Joseph F. Kett, and E. D. Hirsch. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
- Carolyn Perry; Mary Louise Weaks, eds. (2002). History of Southern Women's Literature. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-2753-7.
- Suzanne W. Jones; Sharon Monteith, eds. (2002). South to A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Southern Literary Studies. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-2840-4.
- Tara McPherson (2003). Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822330400.
- "Genres of Southern Literature" by Lucinda MacKethan. Southern Spaces, Feb. 2004.
- Jon Smith; Deborah Cohn, eds. (2004). Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822333166.
- Leigh Anne Duck (2006). The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820334189.
- Riché Richardson (2007). Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820328904.
- Anderson, Eric Gary. "On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession" Southern Spaces. August 9, 2007.
- Leigh Anne Duck (July 2008). "Southern Nonidentity." Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 9 (3): 319–330.
- Harilaos Stecopoulos (2008). Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0801475023.
- )
- Scott Romine (2008). The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0807156384.
- Jennifer Rae Greeson (2010). Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674024281.
- Thadious M. Davis (2011). Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0807835210.
- Deborah Barker; Kathryn McKee, eds. (2011). American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820337104.
- Jonathan Daniel Wells (2011). Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-50349-5.
- Melanie Benson Taylor (2012). Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820338842.
- Jay Watson (2012). Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820343389.
- Richard Gray (2012). "Regionalism in the South". A History of American Literature (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4443-4568-1.
- Keith Cartwright (2013). Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways: Travels in Deep Southern Time, Circum-Caribbean Space, Afro-Creole Authority. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820345994.
- Matthew Pratt Guterl (2013). American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674072282.
- Claudia Milian (2013). Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820344362.
- Jon Smith (2013). Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820345260.
- Jason Phillips, ed. (2013). Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-5035-1.
- David A. Davis; Tara Powell, eds. (2014). Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-62674-210-9.
- Eric Gary Anderson; Taylor Hagood; Daniel Cross Turner, eds. (2015). Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0807161074.
- Martyn Bone; Brian Ward; William A. Link, eds. (2015). Creating and Consuming the American South. University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0813060699.
- Fred Hobson; Barbara Ladd, eds. (2016). Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-049394-3.
- ISBN 978-1-137-47774-3.
- Jennifer Rae Greeson; Scott Romine, eds. (2016). Keywords for Southern Studies. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820349626.
External links
- Library of Southern Literature, University of North Carolina American Southern literature pre-1929.
- The Center for Southern Literature
- "Writers". A Checklist of Scholarship on Southern Literature. Archived from the original on December 6, 2008. (A checklist of scholarship on writers associated with the American South; directory arranged by period: colonial, contemporary, etc. Sponsored by Mississippi Quarterly. Ceased publication. )
- Southern Poetry from Holman Prison Death Row Inmate Darrell Grayson
- "Poets in Place," at Southern Spaces.
- "Society for the Study of Southern Literature".
Organization founded in 1968 devoted to scholarship on writings and writers of the American South
- History of Southern Literature online publishing. Since 1995 the American South has relied on the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature for quality fiction, poetry and more.