From Tobacco Road to Route 66

The Southern Poor White in Fiction

Sylvia Jenkins Cook

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780807873304
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the early nineteenth century, the southern poor white had a reputation for comic vulgarity and absurd violence; postbellum writers saw him as a quaint peasant; the 1920s transformed him into a revolutionary proletarian. Of the literary treatments discussed, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath emerges as a skillful compromise of documentary accuracy and political daring by reviving the tradition of degeneracy. Originally published in 1976. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• I. The Development of the Poor White Tradition
• II. The Image in the Twentieth Century
• III. Faulkner’s Celebration of the Poor White Paradox
• IV. Caldwell’s Politics of the Grotesque
• V. The Gastonia Strike and Proletarian Possibilities
• VI. Poor Whites, Feminists, and Marxists
• VII. Sex and Class Consciousness among the Poor Whites
• VIII. Agee’s Aesthetic of an Unimagined Existence
• IX. Steinbeck’s Retreat into Artfulness
• X. The Transformation of the Poor White in the Depression
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index