Nineteenth Century Southern Literature

Few inhabitants of the South in 1800 thought of it as a "region" or of themselves as "southerners." In time, the need to defend the entire southern way of life became obsessive for many writers, too often precluding efforts at originality in form or style. Especially after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, southern identity and southern nationalism emerged as the grand themes, and literature became subservient to regional interests. The devastation of the Civil War and the collapse of the Confederacy, instead of pointing southern writers in new directions, only intensified their preoccupation with a now-dead past. The popular genres of the time—historical romance and "local color" writing—became tools to voice this preoccupation and have been important influences on America's view of the South and on American literature in general. The myth of the idyllic plantation South has had an extraordinary pervasiveness in the American consciousness. J.V. Ridgely speculates on the ways in which this tarnished but durable myth helped to produce the powerful Southern Renascence of the twentieth century in this concise survey of the literature of America's most distinctive region during a crucial formative period.

The essays in this book explore the role of Grace King’s fiction in the movement of American literature from local color and realism to modernism and show that her work exposes a postbellum New Orleans that is fragmented socially, politically, and linguistically. In her introduction, Melissa Walker Heidari examines selections from King’s journals and letters as views into her journey toward a modernist aesthetic—what King describes in one passage as "the continual voyage I made." Sirpa Salenius sees King’s fiction as a challenge to dominant conceptualizations of womanhood and a reaction against female oppression and heteronormativity. In his analysis of "An Affair of the Heart," Ralph J. Poole highlights the rhetoric of excess that reveals a social satire debunking sexual and racial double standards. Ineke Bockting shows the modernist aspects of King’s fiction through a stylistic analysis which explores spatial, temporal, biological, psychological, social, and racial liminalities. Françoise Buisson demonstrates that King’s writing "is inspired by the Southern oral tradition but goes beyond it by taking on a theatrical dimension that can be quite modern and even experimental at times." Kathie Birat claims that it is important to underline King’s relationship to realism, "for the metonymic functioning of space as a signifier for social relations is an important characteristic of the realist novel." Stéphanie Durrans analyzes "The Story of a Day" as an incest narrative and focuses on King’s development of a modernist aesthetics to serve her terrifying investigation into social ills as she probes the inner world of her silent character. Amy Doherty Mohr explores intersections between regionalism and modernism in public and silenced histories, as well as King’s treatment of myth and mobility. Brigitte Zaugg examines in "The Little Convent Girl" King’s presentation of the figure of the double and the issue of language as well as the narrative voice, which, she argues, "definitely inscribes the text, with its understatement, economy and quiet symbolism, in the modernist tradition." Miki Pfeffer closes the collection with an afterword in which she offers excerpts from King’s letters as encouragement for "scholars to seek Grace King as a primary source," arguing that "Grace King’s own words seem best able to dialogue with the critical readings herein." Each of these essays enables us to see King’s place in the construction of modernity; each illuminates the "continual voyage" that King made.

The twelve Gothic tales of this collection span the nineteenth-century South and are from some of the most famous writers of the age, such as Edgar Allan Poe, to more recently rediscovered and now celebrated writers such as Kate Chopin and Charles Chesnutt, to the completely and unfairly obscure E. Levi Brown. Companion readings—some themselves quite chilling—are by celebrated writers and well-known historical figures, such as Thomas Jefferson, Charles Brockden Brown, Jacques Dessalines, and W. E. B DuBois. These readings place the fiction in the context of the South and the Caribbean: the revolution in Haiti, Nat Turner’s rebellion, the realities of slavery and the myths spun by its apologists, the aftermath of the Civil War, and the brutalities of Jim Crow laws.

Authors discussed include: Wendell Berry, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote, Zora Neal Hurston, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, William Styron, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, and many more. By World War II, the Southern Renaissance had established itself as one of the most significant literary events of the century, and today much of the best American fiction is southern fiction. Though the flowering of realistic and local-color writing during the first two decades of the century was a sign of things to come, the period between the two world wars was the crucial one for the South's literary development: a literary revival in Richmond came to fruition; at Vanderbilt University a group of young men produced The Fugitive, a remarkable, controversial magazine that published some of the century's best verse in its brief run; and the publication and widespread recognition of Faulkner (among others) inaugurated the great flood of southern writing that was to follow in novels, short stories, poetry, and plays. With more than forty years of experience writing and reading about the subject, and friendships with many of the figures discussed, J. A. Bryant is uniquely qualified to provide the first comprehensive account of southern American literature since 1900. Bryant pays attention to both the cultural and the historical context of the works and authors discussed, and presents the information in an enjoyable, accessible style. No lover of great American literature can afford to be without this book.

Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.

The first study to focus on white and black women journalists and writers both before and after the Civil War, this book offers fresh insight into Southern intellectual life, the fight for women's rights and gender ideology. Based on new research into Southern magazines and newspapers, this book seeks to shift scholarly attention away from novelists and toward the rich and diverse periodical culture of the South between 1820 and 1900. Magazines were of central importance to the literary culture of the South because the region lacked the publishing centers that could produce large numbers of books. As editors, contributors, correspondents and reporters in the nineteenth century, Southern women entered traditionally male bastions when they embarked on careers in journalism. In so doing, they opened the door to calls for greater political and social equality at the turn of the twentieth century.

This collection of critical essays examines the contributions to and influences on literature that have been made by Southern women writers.--From publisher description.