THE SOUTHERN LITERARY RENAISSANCE

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THE SOUTHERN LITERARY RENAISSANCE

• Writers
• Movements
• Themes

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The American South

• Includes 16 states
• The South Atlantic States Delaware, Florida,
  Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South
  Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia(plus the
  District of Columbia)

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The American South

• The East South Central States Alabama, Kentucky,
  Mississippi and Tennessee
• The West South Central States Arkansas,
  Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas
• As defined by the Census Bureau currently
  contains eight of the twenty-five largest
  metropolitan areas, as well as portions of two
  others

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The American South

• Not all definitions of the South based on
  strictly geographic divisions
• Culture and history also playing a large role in
  defining what is the South
• The Deep South
• - a cultural and geographic sub-region
• - the Mississippi delta East Arkansas, South
  Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia,
  and Louisiana

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The American South

• Historically, the South refers to the Old South
• - Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina,
  South Carolina, and Georgia
• The Deep South and the Old South used to be known
  colloquially as Dixie, and may still be referred
  to nostalgically as such

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The South and the Northeast

• The South not settled by Puritans
• Settled by a wide variety of people with diverse
  motives who saw great opportunities in the warm
  and fertile South
• The Puritans regarded nature and themselves as
  corrupted
• The early travelers, explorers, and promoters of
  life in the South saw the region as a New Eden
  where mankind could begin its history anew

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The American South

• The end of the Civil War and its aftermath
• - sharpening and perpetuating cultural
  differences
• - the economic discriminations locked the region
  for years
• - a colonial economy
• - remained basically rural, agricultural, and
  poor
• - industrialization was transforming it but too
  slowly

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The Literary South

• This original cleanness, and its tragic marring,
  have remained a central preoccupation of Southern
  literature
• Another version of the New Eden was the agrarian
  ideal, most prominently espoused by Thomas
  Jefferson
• At the beginning of the twentieth century this
  ideal was still vital in the South

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The Literary South

• To be a Southern writer does not necessarily mean
  to have Southern parents (Eudora Welty)
• It does not mean spending your whole life in that
  region, either (William Styron)
• Historically Southern literature is quite unique
  as a literary tradition on its own

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The Southern Agrarians

• Appeared in the 1920, took a clearly expressed
  anti-industrial stance
• Became known also as the Fugitives
• - the name of the literary magazine The
  Fugitive, published from 1922 to 1925 at
  Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee
• - the tittle of their anthology of verse,
  Fugitives An Anthology of Verse (1928)

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The Southern Agrarians

• Expressed a conservative outlook as a whole
• Rejected northern urban, commercial values,
  which had taken over America
• Called for a return to the land and to American
  traditions that could be found in the South

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The Southern Agrarians

• Ill Take My Stand The South and the Agrarian
  Tradition (1930)
• - the rural history
• - social advocacy
• - positions largely conservative

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Ill Take My Stand

• The South could serve as a model for a society
  where man not the machine will be dominant
• Against the dehumanization brought about by
  industrialization
• Although the South could not remain entirely
  agricultural, the southern way of life was more
  contributing to a full relationship between man
  and nature

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Members

• John Crowe Ransom
• Allan Tate
• Robert Pen Warren
• Cleanth Brooks
• Editors of The Southern Review
• New Criticism, concerned with analysis of
  literary form and meaning

John Crowe Ransom
Allan Tate
Robert Pen Warren
Cleanth Brooks
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The Southern Agrarians

• As writers they often turned back to the past to
  re-tell the lives of the Souths great men
• Allen Tates biographies of Stonewall Jackson
  (1928), and Jefferson Davis (1929)
• Robert Penn Warrens of John Brown (1929)
• John Crowe Ransoms God Without Thunder (1930)

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Themes in Southern Literature

• The representation in fiction of racial relations
• From the late eighteenth century, as slavery
  became increasingly important to the Southern
  economy antebellum white Southerners were more
  often than not characterized by Northerners and
  European visitors as lazy, despotic, cruel,
  irreligious, ignorant

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Themes in Southern Literature

• The writers in the South responded to such
  vilification in different ways
• A retreat from the vexing particularities of time
  and place in a poetry of detached pastoral
  abstractions that could be set anytime, anywhere
• - Philip Pendleton Cooke
• - Thomas Holly Chivers
• - Edgar Allan Poe

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Themes in Southern Literature

• Another response
• - to display Southern people, and human nature
  as feckless, greedy, lazy, and uproariously, if
  vulgarly, funny
• The work of the Southwestern humorists
• - George Washington Harris
• - Johnson Jones Hooper
• - Joseph Glover Baldwin
• - Mark Twain

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Themes in Southern Literature

• The third reaction
• - polemical
• - the essays by Louisa McCord and George
  Fitzhugh
• Fictionalized polemics, such as the plantation
  novels by John Pendleton Kennedy, William Gilmore
  Simms, Caroline Lee Hentz

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The Plantation Novel

• An enduring genre in Southern literature
• Characterized by a benign patriarchal master and
  his pure and charitable wife presiding over
  child-like blacks in the plantation family
• Slave narratives, like those of Harriet Jacobs
  and Frederick Douglass, provided quite a
  different version of plantation life

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The Plantation Novel and Local Color

• After the Civil War, the plantation novel became
  part of the local color movement
• Vast nostalgia for places, peoples, and times as
  yet untouched by industrialism and urbanisation
• Poets like Henry Timrod and Sidney Lanier were
  early mourners of The Lost Cause, but its most
  prominent practitioners were fiction writers

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The Local Color Movement

• Thomas Nelson Page, Kate Chopin, Grace King,
  George Washington Cable, and Charles Chesnutt
  were not just nostalgic
• Often ambivalent toward or condemnatory of racism
• A heartbreaking beauty in many aspects of the
  Southern landscape and its people
• Local color writing flourished through the 1890s,
  after which it lost popularity

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Cultural Changes

• Local colour became less evident, the tone less
  defensive after the turn of the century
• There was a new readiness to examine objectively
  and to criticize southern customs, attitudes, and
  habits of mind

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Cultural Changes

• Regional writing in the South was still evident,
  as in the Virginia-based novels of Ellen Glasgow,
  whose work attempted a more realistic depiction
  of the strength and weaknesses of the South
• Together with the resurgence of interest in
  regionalism in the 1930s, a new intellectual
  movement started which has become known as the
  Southern Literary Renaissance

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The Southern Renaissance as a Literary Movement

• The Southern Renaissance refers roughly to the
  period between the two world wars
• The writers were far enough in time from the
  Civil War and slavery to regard their region with
  some degree of objectivity
• Used the techniques of international modernism,
  such as stream of consciousness, complex points
  of view, and jarring juxtapositions

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Cultural Context

• By the 1920s the time was really ripe for the
  emergence and flowering of a Balzacian series of
  novels
• Nearly all the writers of this period tend to see
  the story of individuals involved with the
  history of a family and that involved with the
  history of a culture and of a region
• For them the society with which they are
  concerned is a traditional society and the past
  is still alive

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The Cultural Context

• Why then did a great surge of creative energy
  manifest itself in the South just at that time?
• A possible answer is that when an older culture
  is beginning to disappear, when the bonds which
  tie its members together are becoming loose and
  people become conscious of the past as truly
  past, it is just then that a literary flowering
  may occur

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The Cultural Context

• For half a century the southern states had been
  economically stagnant
• Reconstruction had not really reconstructed the
  social pattern or the basic values
• And now the time had come for questioning the old
  truths and the past of their region.
• The result was an unusual situation of double
  focus, a looking two ways (Allan Tate) which
  proved to be creatively fruitful

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Writers of the Southern Renaissance

• William Faulkner
• Allen Tate
• Robert Penn Warren
• Eudora Welty
• Caroline Gordon
• Katherine Anne Porter
• Thomas Wolfe

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Writers and Themes

• Members
• - up to 524 writers of fiction since 1920
• Address two essential themes in their works
• The burden of the past
• - it is the complex legacy of shame and guilt,
  which makes history become an individuals fate

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The Burden of the Past

• This burden can be great but the emphasis on the
  societal over the individual leads to the heroic
  Southern stoicism
• Individuals face decline and defeat with a public
  face of bravery, fortitude, and nobility

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Writers and Themes

• The second major theme
• The individuals relationship to his or her
  community closely linked to the burden of the
  past
• In Northeastern American literature, identity is
  proudly and defiantly individual in the Puritan
  and Transcendental traditions
• The Southerners identity/honor is based on his
  or her standing in the community and family
  determined by the burden of the past

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The Gender Aspect

• The work of gender linked to the tendency to
  equate power with masculinity
• The finctioning of the images of the New Woman
  (embodied in the Roaring Twenties flapper
  figure) and the way southern authors tried to
  shape or control these emerging images
• The New Womans desire, outspokenness, and
  autonomy sparked divergent responses from women
  and men in the South.

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The Gender Aspect

• Female writers saw liberation in this figure and
  managed to ensure her survival
• Their male counterparts perceived little to be
  gained and much to be feared from the onset of
  womens freedoms
• This shows the profoundly different responses of
  male and female Southern Renaissance writers to
  modernist conceptions of gender

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Southern Women Writers

• Extending the boundaries and the canon of this
  literature have challenged the notion that the
  Southern Renaissance originated in Nashville with
  the Fugitive poets
• Demonstrated the existence of an earlier female
  leadership in the awakening of southern letters
  centered around The Reviewer, a highly acclaimed
  Richmond-based literary magazine published
  between 1921 and 1925

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Women Writers

• The Reviewer launched the careers of several
  women writers, including Sara Haardt Mencken,
  Julia Peterkin, and Frances Newman
• A clear, but overlooked, evidence of a modern,
  southern female literary movement
• Cleared the way for Faulkner and other canonized
  writers and anticipated the Southern Gothic
  fiction of Flannery OConnor and Carson McCullers