Abstract
C. Vann Woodward, in hisOrigins of the New South, suggestively links the economic revival in the South in the late 19th century with a literary revival, a revival that he judges as distinctly inferior to its economic counterpart: âFor all the shortcomings and the comparative brevity of the revival ⊠the Southern writers undeniably possessed solid virtues. Among them, however, one will search in vain for a realistic portrayal of their own times ⊠the writers were too preoccupied with the quaint âtypesâ of the hinterland to notice what was going on in their own parlorsâ (164). Preoccupied with a nostalgic vision of region, Southern writers failed, it is generally agreed, to represent significant social changes in realistic terms. More recently, Jules Chametzky has echoed Vann Wood-ward's observation when he wrote that âlocal color and regionalism ⊠became ⊠toward the end of the nineteenth century, a strategy, largely, for ignoring or minimizing social issues of great significanceâ (21). Of course, not all local colorists ignored or minimized these issues â only those who I've taken to calling âweak local colorists.â Writers like Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris looked back, nostalgically, to a romanticized past; in flight from their present, they used the plantation past as a way of attempting to justify the status quo in the South at the turn of the centnry.
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