“We’re what we are because of the Past”: History, Memory, Nostalgia, and Identity in Walter Sullivan’s <i>The Long, Long Love</i>

Abstract

Walter Sullivan (1924–2006), a Nashville, Tennessee native who spent most of his academic and professional life at Vanderbilt University, is generally considered by critics as a literary descendent of the first two generations of Fugitive-Agrarians and the Southern Renaissance to which they belong. This essay seeks to position Sullivan’s second, largely forgotten novel, The Long, Long Love as part of the postagrarian, post-Renaissance, postmodern, and post-southern American intellectual reevaluation of the South that questions tradition through an assertion of “pro–New South, pro–urban, and pro–capitalist” values and thoroughly reconsiders Civil War “truths,” myths, history, and memory.