Class Whiteness And Southern Literature

Shows how representations of poor white southerners helped shape middle-class identity and major American literary movements and genres.

Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature explores the role that representations of poor white people play in shaping both middle-class American identity and major American literary movements and genres across the long twentieth century. Jolene Hubbs reveals that, more often than not, poor white characters imagined by middle-class writers embody what better-off people are anxious to distance themselves from in a given moment. Poor white southerners are cast as social climbers during the status-conscious Gilded Age, country rubes in the modern era, racist obstacles to progress during the civil rights struggle, and junk food devotees in the health-conscious 1990s. Hubbs illuminates how Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, and Barbara Robinette Moss swam against these tides, pioneering formal innovations with an eye to representing poor white characters in new ways.

"This book examines the concept of whiteness as imagined by four Southern writers of the post-Reconstruction period: Thomas Nelson Page, Ellen Glasgow, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Izabela Hopkins argues that the unique narrative positions of these writers, offering their perspectives from both sides of the color line, allow for an objective scrutiny of the role of place and heritage in conceptions of Southern whiteness. By examining these authors, the project presents an alternate interpretation of Southern whiteness and demonstrates that reconstructions of whiteness need not be reduced to outward manifestations of color-white or black-but rather purposefully explore the ambivalence existing in the US South of the early twentieth century"--

Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900–1965 argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as “white trash” have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or to people with disabilities. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., “white trash,” tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Sutton Griggs, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to recategorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of “white trash.”

Explores the abundance of Native American representations in US Southern literature.

If the nation as a whole during the 1940s was halfway between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the postwar prosperity of the 1950s, the South found itself struggling through an additional transition, one bound up in an often violent reworking of its own sense of history and regional identity. Examining the changing nature of racial politics in the 1940s, McKay Jenkins measures its impact on white Southern literature, history, and culture. Jenkins focuses on four white Southern writers--W. J. Cash, William Alexander Percy, Lillian Smith, and Carson McCullers--to show how they constructed images of race and race relations within works that professed to have little, if anything, to do with race. Sexual isolation further complicated these authors' struggles with issues of identity and repression, he argues, allowing them to occupy a space between the privilege of whiteness and the alienation of blackness. Although their views on race varied tremendously, these Southern writers' uneasy relationship with their own dominant racial group belies the idea that "whiteness" was an unchallenged, monolithic racial identity in the region.

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932), critically acclaimed for his novels, short stories, and essays, was one of the most ambitious and influential African American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today recognized as a major innovator of American fiction, Chesnutt is an important contributor to deromanticizing trends in post–Civil War southern literature, and a singular voice among turn-of-the-century realists who wrote about race in American life. Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt is the first study to focus exclusively on Chesnutt's novels. Examining the three published in Chesnutt's lifetime—The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel's Dream—as well as his posthumously published novels, this study explores the dilemma of a black writer who wrote primarily for a white audience. Throughout, Matthew Wilson analyzes the ways in which Chesnutt crafted narratives for his white readership and focuses on how he attempted to infiltrate and manipulate the feelings and convictions of that audience. Wilson pays close attention to the genres in which Chesnutt was working and also to the social and historical context of the novels. In articulating the development of Chesnutt's career, Wilson shows how Chesnutt's views on race evolved. By the end of his career, he felt that racial differences were not genetically inherent, but social constructions based on our background and upbringing. Finally, the book closely examines Chesnutt's unpublished manuscripts that did not deal with race. Even in these works, in which African Americans are only minor characters, Wilson finds Chesnutt engaged with the conundrum of race and reveals him as one of America's most significant writers on the subject.

Explores how both black and white southern writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Ellen Douglas, and Ernest Gaines have employed oral storytelling in literature Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White is a study of the historical use of oral storytelling by southern writers in written works. In each chapter, Sarah Gilbreath Ford pairs a white and an African American writer to highlight points of confluence in black and white southern oral traditions. She argues that the connections between white and African American southern writers run deeper than critics have yet explored, and she uses textual comparisons to examine the racial mixing of oral culture. On porches, in kitchens, and on the pages of their work, black and white southerners exchanged not just stories but strategies for telling stories. As a boy, Joel Chandler Harris listened to the stories of African American slaves, and he devised a framework to turn the oral stories into written ones. Harris’s use of the frame structure influenced how Charles Chesnutt recorded oral stories, but it led Alice Walker to complain that her heritage had been stolen. Mark Twain listened to African American storytellers as a child. His use of oral dialects then impacts how Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner employ oral storytelling and how Toni Morrison later writes in response to Faulkner. The interactions are not linear, not a chain of influence, but a network of interactions, borrowings, and revisions. Ford’s pairings lead to new readings that reveal how the writers employ similar strategies in their narratives, due in part to shared historical context. While Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner, for example, use oral storytelling in the 1930s to examine the fear of racial mixing, Ellen Douglas and Ernest Gaines use it in the 1970s to build bridges between the races. Exploring the cultural crossing that occurs in the use of oral storytelling, Ford offers a different view of this common strategy in southern narrative and a new perspective on how culture is shared.