Southern Fiction

4 Key excerpts on "Southern Fiction"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Routledge History of the American South

  • Maggi Morehouse, Maggi M. Morehouse(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  14Southern Literature

  Taylor Hagood

  It goes without saying that it is impossible to gain the fullest possible understanding of the American South without knowing its literature. The region’s writing is rich, and it provides vital ways of understanding the South and its many contradictions. This chapter therefore considers the characteristics of southern literature—in fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction—along with a survey of its major works.

  Before delving into the details of this literary history, it is useful to provide comments about some of the features that define southern literature. One of these is a tendency to employ certain character, narrative, and setting types. Society is and has been fluid and complex throughout southern history, and many different kinds of places, with distinct histories, economics, and political situations, make up the South. Yet southern literature has generally worked within a powerful typology that readers have often assumed to be accurate markers of society. The range of these types is wide and varied according to the historical moment. Prominent types include the following: character types such as the southern belle, the mammy, and the poor white mountain man; landscape types such as cotton fields, swamps, and southern mountain cabins; dialects such as black, white trash, and Cajun; and class distinctions between poor whites and blacks, so-called yeomen farmers, and white aristocrats.

  As is the case with most types, there are elements of truth within them individually and in relation to one another, but they more often than not more readily serve artistic purposes. This is not to say that writing located in other parts of the United States does not employ types but rather that those of southern literary history have assumed especial power that serves important psychological and cultural purposes both for the South and for the country as a whole. Described as the “nation’s other” by scholar Leigh Anne Duck, the South can often be seen as the evil, rotten, poor, uneducated netherworld with a past of slavery, racism, and religious backwardness in a country that otherwise thinks of itself as successful, progressive, and freedom-loving. The types of the South operate strongly within this machinery, and writers are obliged to grapple with them. Indeed, while much contemporary writing achieves a more richly complex and often realistic representation and engagement with the South, there remains a strong tendency to work within the shorthand of southern typology, even if to do so only for ironic purposes, most clearly in what has been called postsouthern writing, which will be discussed toward the end of this chapter.

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  Still in Print

  The Southern Novel Today

  • Jan Nordby Gretlund, Jan Nordby Gretlund(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • University of South Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  and on the author’s involvement in her own fiction. To what extent, we ask, does the writer’s life translate into fiction? If we are honest, we must admit that we ask this question frequently. As contributing critics to this collection, we have feared getting lost in the southern writers’ interesting biographical backgrounds, so while the essays focus on one novel each, we have supplied a separate biographical sketch for each writer, and the main focus remains on the reading of one novel. We also include extensive bibliographies for those who want to read more fiction by an author or want to read more about the author.

  Writers of highly divergent styles, techniques, and theoretical approaches seem to share an understanding of literature that confirms its traditional function and status in society, even in the everyday world of local communities. In general the contemporary southern novel is not a literature that reflects a modern feeling of homelessness and alienation, which does not mean that it offers characters wholly without problems—on the contrary. But the point is that it is a literature that does not try to separate itself from the southern context from which it emerges.

  The interactions between the individual and the collective spheres remain crucial. Let us, as an aside, look at the ideas of “the family of man” and “the global village,” which are still popular. But should they be? Not from a Jeffersonian point of view. The ideas offer no acceptable excuse for not knowing anything about where you are, the people who live and lived here, and what happened in their lives. We need to note that the most important element in the expression “the family of man” is the word “man,” as in “mankind.” The southern novel of today reminds us that the individual human being is always more important than anything as vague as “an idea.” You have to be a member of a family, a particular concrete family—if you are not, create one as people do, also in Southern Fiction—then, and only then, you can try to be a part of something as abstract as “the family of man.” In a similar way for a southerner the important element of the Emersonian expression “the global village” is the word “village.” First you must belong to a village, be a part of a community—a local community, because all ideas and art, all history and literature, has its origin in a particular community. If you are of the village, then, and only then, can you be a member of anything as abstract and undemanding as “the global village” and other transcendental structures of meaning. The humorous fiction of Singleton, Edgerton, Wilcox, Harington, and Nordan show how the clichés function as distractions from the realities and needs of daily life, and that if they are not validated in the particular life in the community, the clichés remain just that. If we do not get to know the village and its individual members, any talk of the family of man and the global village is just a mental exercise. The novelists make sure we get to know that their characters are surrounded by their southern families and are totally engulfed in their communities.

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  New Perspectives on the South

  • J. A. BryantJr.(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  PART ONE The Making of a Southern Literature 1 The Development of Modern Southern Fiction In the difficult years following the Civil War, literature produced in the South continued, as before, to be mainly fiction. Much of that followed the pattern that had been established, or at least anticipated, by John Pendleton Kennedy in his ambivalent celebration of Virginia plantation life, Swallow Barn (1832). Kennedy, writing three decades before the outbreak of war, had portrayed the Virginia planter as the heir to such cavalier virtues as pride in family and land, love of honor, respect for bravery, and courtesy toward women, but Kennedy was also prepared to acknowledge that the planter’s pastoral existence rested upon the indefensible evil of chattel slavery, for which, he believed, some permanent remedy should be sought. His postwar successors felt less free to be so openly ambivalent. A notable example was the Atlanta journalist Joel Chandler Harris (18481908), who limited his observations about the disparity between the races to symbolic representation in a series of folk tales told by an aging black narrator to the child of his widowed mistress. Harris had found a model for his character in the plantation darkie of poet Irwin Russell’s “Christmas Night in the Quarters” (1878), and he began his own variation on that figure by creating a stereotyped black street character to enliven his series of newspaper sketches. When these proved locally popular, he gave his creation a young child for an audience, moved both to a plantation, and through the old man’s mouth delivered in convincing dialect the now familiar tales of Brer Rabbit and his animal friends. The result was Harris’s first book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1880), the immense popularity of which led him to produce a number of others centered on black characters, including three more collections of Uncle Remus’s stories (1883, 1892, and 1905)

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  Keywords for Southern Studies

  • Jon Smith, Riché Richardson, Scott Romine, Jennifer Rae Greeson(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Georgia Press

    (Publisher)

  Note that geographical criteria do not necessarily determine the boundaries of southern literature(s) according to this definition. Most “southern” texts will, predictably enough, be produced by people who lived in and wrote about the South. But not only does reliance on such a criterion beg the question of defining the South—the former Confederacy? all places in the U.S. where slavery existed legally after the ratification of the Constitution? all places in the New World where plantation agriculture established itself? perhaps even what Paul Gilroy dubbed “the black Atlantic?” or, as John Shelton Reed has proposed, all places where at least 35 percent of listings in urban telephone directories are “Southern”?—it ignores the fact that writers who exist outside these places have produced important work that engages with and betrays an investment in the South (Russell Banks, Toni Morrison, and V. S. Naipaul all come to mind). See J. S. Reed, My Tears Spoiled My Aim, 27. 2. Romine, Real South, 13, 14. 3. Ladd, “Literary Studies,” 1629. 4. Excellent representative works include Smith and Cohn’s edited volume, Look Away! ; Bone’s Postsouthern Sense of Place ; Duck’s Nation’s Region ; Benson’s Disturbing Calculations ; and, with a broader focus on culture, Peacock’s Grounded Globalism. 5. Both Erfahrung and Erlebnis translate as “experience,” but the former has connotations of “genuine” experience, richly felt and intellectually understood, while the latter remains, in Benjamin’s words, “in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life.” To mark an experience as “a precise point in time in consciousness”—that is, as Erlebnis —comes “at the cost of the integrity of its contents.” See Benjamin, Illuminations, 163. 6. I do not mean to imply that Earley, Smith, and Shearer are all (or all equally) “conservative,” or that there is nothing “critical” about their portrayals of the South

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