World War I and Southern Modernism by David A. Davis (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: World War I and Southern Modernism by David A. Davis Joy Landeira David A. Davis. World War I and Southern Modernism. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2018. 233 p. After setting an icy tone with Robert Penn Warren's epigraph, "World War I changed everything. It was a great shock to the whole country, but the war broke open a frozen culture like the southern world," David A. Davis not only demonstrates how WWI cracked the South's frozen culture, but convincingly delineates how it "played a pivotal role in the emergence of Modernism." Both a cultural and literary phenomenon, Southern Modernism's experimentation, awareness of rural versus urban discontinuity, critique of the past, and exposure to modernity characterize this unstoppable movement. No longer valorizing the "lost cause" of the civil war, the Southern Renaissance--or Renasence—between the two World Wars (1920–40) challenged established frigid and rigid social structures, particularly the treatment of African Americans and women, and the glacial expectations of cotton growing and poverty. Combining literary technique with critical perspective, writers including Faulkner, both Fitzgeralds, Frances Newman, and Zora Neale Hurston observed the effects of modernity in the South and warmed to new ideas, technologies, social practices and divergent cultures. The key word to understanding Southern Modernism is disruption—disruption of the frozen culture, and disruption of literary tradition. After 1848, modernism ushered in an urban heat wave radiating from European capitals in Paris, London, Madrid and Vienna that sparked new perspectives and ignited a blaze of literary conflagration that reflected similar outbreaks and variants of urban modernism in Mexico and Latin America as well. Out of the nineteenth century's smoldering and moldering cinders, modernity disrupted old forms and instigated new approaches. Futurist and vanguardist dictums to "make it new" kindled fresh attitudes in US urban centers from New York, to Chicago, to Detroit to California and even sprung to life in the South with the New Negro movement, the New Southern Woman, and the New Mechanical Order. [End Page 203] The South's old ice age with its subordination of black Americans didn't just melt away. African American soldiers had defended their nation, and yet were expected to return to the same segregated and disenfranchised states they had left. The war incited a confrontational period for civil rights and for African American modernism—in particular, the Harlem Renaissance. Davis interprets three literary texts that fictionalize the experience of returning veterans. Victor R. Daly's Not Only war: A Story of Two Great Conflicts is the only novel written by a black American veteran. The titular conflicts are the war in France and the experience of being a Southern black. Walter White's The Fire in the Flint depicts racial violence, lynching, torching and murder in an attempt to illustrate social inequalities and promote civil rights. The exploitation of blacks and the effects of the war in Home to Harlem, by Claude McKay, one of Harlem's leading black radicals, profiles the international black experience of racial oppression. Some urban proximal sites of modernity like Harlem promised a cosmopolitan modernist space, but offered another sort of exile and fugitive experience. The freedom found in urban centers did not extend to the small towns and the South, revealing more hypocrisy and white supremacy, and the mandate to use writing as combat. For women, too, the war disrupted domestic life and fragmented society. To mirror these changes, linear narrative gives way to fragmented, nonlinear experiments. Social changes and the instability of identity and female roles inspire women's modernist writing. The "New Southern Woman" displaces the archetypal nineteenth century Southern belle. A particularly astute reading of Jonah's Gourd Vine illuminates how Zora Neale Hurston conveys the sense of disruption and "whirling cacophony of wartime" through disjointed montage and disembodied voices. By blending history, sociological profiles and literary textual analysis throughout World War I and Southern Modernism, David A. Davis upholds his clearly stated argument that World War I played "a pivotal role in the emergence of southern modernism." Factual evaluations of societal and economic sectors underscore the theme of disruption that begets modernism. WWI meant profitability, particularly in the South where President Woodrow...