Rough South, Rural South

Region and Class in Recent Southern Literature

Jean W. Cash, Keith Perry

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781496804969
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Essays in Rough South, Rural South describe and discuss the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education: Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Brad Watson, Daniel Woodrell, and Steve Yarbrough. Their twenty-first-century colleagues are Wiley Cash, Peter Farris, Skip Horack, Michael Farris Smith, Barb Johnson, and Jesmyn Ward. In his seminal article, Erik Bledsoe distinguishes Rough South writers from such writers as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Younger writers who followed Harry Crews were born into and write about the Rough South. These writers undercut stereotypes, forcing readers to see the working poor differently. The next pieces begin with those on Crews and Cormac McCarthy, major influences on an entire generation. Later essays address members of both groups—the self-educated and the college-educated. Both groups share a clear understanding of the value of working-class southerners. Nearly all of the writers hold a reverence for the South's landscape and its inhabitants as well as an affinity for realistic depictions of setting and characters.

INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

Abbott, Megan

Acorn Plan, The (McLaurin)

After Southern Modernism: Fiction of the Contemporary South (Guinn)

Algren, Nelson

Allison, Dorothy

All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy)

All We Need of Hell (Crews)

Andrzejewski, Jerzy

Another Son of Man (McLaurin)

Anthony, Joseph

Arbeit, Marcel

Arkansas (Brandon)

As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)

Badlands (film)

Bass, Rick

Bastard Out of Carolina (Allison)

Batts, Bertha Kaye. See Gibbons, Kaye

“Bear, The” (Faulkner)

Beasts of the Southern Wild (film)

Benson, Robert

Berry, Wendell

Betts, Doris

Big Bad Love (Brown)

Billy Ray’s Farm (Brown)

Birth of a Nation, The (film)

Bjerre, Thomas Ærvold

Black Mountain Breakdown (Smith)

Black Snake Moan (film)

Bledsoe, Erik

Blood and Grits (Crews)

Blood Meridian (McCarthy)

“Blue Horses” (Franklin)

“Blue Lick” (Offutt)

Blumhofer, Edith L.

Bock, Charles

Body (Crews)

“Bonedaddy, Quincy Nell, and the Fifteen Thousand BTU Electric Chair” (Gay)

Bonetti, Kay

Boorman, John

Brandon, John

Brewer, Craig

Brooks, Cleanth

Brother to Dragons (Warren)

Brown, Larry; influence of

Brown, Mary Annie

Brown, W. Dale

“Bug Man, The” (Gautreaux)

But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (Hobson)

Caldwell, Erskine

Calling (Starnes)

Campbell, Will D.

Car (Crews)

“Carny” (Crews)

Carpenter, Brian

Carr, Duane

Cash, Wiley

Celebration (Crews)

Charms for the Easy Life (Gibbons)

Childhood: The Biography of a Place, A (Crews)

Child of God (McCarthy)

Christian Century

Citrus County (Brandon)

Clansman, The (Dixon)

Class conflict

Class stratification

Class structure

Clay’s Quilt (House)

Clearing, The (Gautreaux)

“Climbing the Tower” (Crews)

Coal Tattoo, The (House)

Coen, Ethan

Coen, Joel

Cold Mountain (Frazier)

Connell, R. W.

Conroy, Pat

Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South (Hennis)

Cook, Sylvia Jenkins

“Cormac McCarthy: The Hard Wages of Original Sin” (Schafer)

“Courtship of Merlin LeBlanc, The” (Gautreaux)

Cove, The (Rash)

Covel, Robert C.

Craig, Eli

Crews, Harry; influence of

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (Franklin)

“Crossroads Blues” (Gay)

Crowther, Hal

Cured by Fire (McLaurin)

Cure for Dreams, A (Gibbons)

Davidson, Donald

Days of Heaven (film)

Death of Sweet Mister, The (Woodrell)

Delillo, Don

Deliverance (film)

“Delta Autumn” (Faulkner)

Dexter, Pete

Dickey, James

Dillard, R. H. W.

“Dinosaurs” (Franklin)

Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing 1930–1990 (Yaeger)

Dirty Work (Brown)

“Dispossessed White as Naked Ape and Stereotyped Hillbilly in the Southern Novels of Cormac McCarthy, The” (Carr)

Dixon, Thomas

“‘Dogged by Some Sins from Their Past’: An...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Rough South, Rural South
• “Rough South”: Beginnings
• From “The Rise of Southern Redneck and White Trash Writers”
• Harry Crews: Progenitor
• Elevated above the Real: The Poor White Southerner in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels
• Tim McLaurin: Universality from Rural North Carolina
• Larry Brown: A Firefighter Finds His Voice
• Dorothy Allison: Revising the “White Trash” Narrative
• A World Almost Rotten: The Fiction of William Gay
• “Recover the Paths”: Salvage in Tom Franklin’s Fiction
• The Rough South of Ron Rash
• “Everything Worth Doing Hurts Like Hell”: The Rough South of Tim Gautreaux
• Education Is Everything: Chris Offutt’s Eastern Kentucky
• Daniel Woodrell, Ozarker
• Kaye Gibbons: Tough Women in a Rough South
• Lee Smith: A Diamond from the Rough
• A Country for Old Men: The South of Clyde Edgerton’s Early Novels
• Jill McCorkle: The Rough South from One Remove
• “The Spiritual Energy of the Trees”: Nature, Place, and Religion in Silas House’s Crow County Trilogy
• Steve Yarbrough: Transplanted Mississippian
• Once a Paradise: Brad Watson’s Southern Afterlife
• Twenty-First-Century Writers: The Rural Southern Tradition Continues
• Trash or Treasure? Images of the Hardscrabble South in Twenty-First-Century Film
• Notes on Contributors
• Photograph Credits
• Index