Literary Studies: The Southern United States, 2005

Abstract

“The Greatest Mistake Made in Judging Southern Literature, Even by its Friends, is That We are Apt to Speak of it By Itself as if it were a thing apart and a country apart.” John Bell Henneman made this assessment a century ago, in 1903 (347). Fifty-one years later, Jay B. Hubbell observed, “The literature of the South … cannot be understood and appraised if one neglects its many and complicated relations with the literature of the rest of the nation” ('x“). Not long after Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs publishedThe Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South(1953), a collection of essays by distinguished United States scholars in and beyond the South, the study of southern literature, conceived in the spirit of Henneman and Hubbell, became an academic specialty, with its centers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (where Rubin taught); at Vanderbilt University (the home of Thomas Daniel Young, the New Critics, and, a generation earlier, the Agrarians); and at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (where Lewis P. Simpson edited theSouthern Review).There were outriders: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren infiltrated Yale. They made such an impression that, today, when people from the Northeast are asked to define southern United States literature, they are likely to channel Brooks in his emphasis on the importance of family, kinship, community, history, and memory in the imagined South. None of this is meant to imply that the literature of the southern United States was not studied before the mid-fifties; it was. Its departures from the broader national tradition were noted, but it did not constitute an academic specialty as it does today. The publication ofThe Southern Renascenceand subsequent work by Rubin, Hubbell, Brooks and Warren, C. Hugh Holman, and many others not only institutionalized southern literature as a specialization in the United States academy but also defined the field in terms of the South's relations with the rest of the nation.