Southern Culture Research Articles

The Southern Literary Journal, volume xlii, number 2, fall 2010© 2010 by The Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature. All rights reserved. 149 Cataloging Southern Culture at Home and Abroad by Angie Maxwell Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South in Europe–Europe in the American South. Ed. Richard Gray and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Science P, 2007. 599 pp. €65,00 paper. The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 9: Literature. Ed. M. Thomas Inge and Charles Reagan Wilson (series editor). Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008. xx + 511 pp. $45.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. The two collections under review here attempt to reframe and classify southern culture — especially southern literature — within the modern critical categories of race, gender, transnationalism, psychology , and so forth. While Inge and Wilson’s literature volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture redefines the fundamental themes and authors at the center of southern letters, Gray and Zacharasiewicz’s Transatlantic Exchanges breaks new ground by surveying the mutually constructive relationships of European and southern cultures. As a larger project, Inge and Wilson’s extended and significantly revised multi- volume encyclopedia — the original one- volume Encyclopedia of Southern Culture was published in 1989 — does much more than simply catalog all things southern. Each volume benefits from various critical and scholarly commentaries that map their respective landscapes more objectively and more comprehensively than past attempts. This single volume on literature allows the editors and contributors to 150 Southern Literary Journal incorporate thematic essays that consider such timely topics as “Food in Literature,” “Globalization and Southern Literature,” and “Postsouthern literature.” Each essay represents an integral investigation into what some scholars have labeled the “new southern studies.” Such thematic entries, which comprise nearly a third of the collection, proceed historically and reveal a diverse tradition, often referencing lesser- known authors, including sentimental novelists and writers of local color. Some of these minor authors do not have full author entries, which would, of course, substantially increase the length of the volume, but their presence in the thematic essays enriches the scholarly potential of the collection. The individual author entries follow a traditional format, offering a brief synopsis of the authors’ lives and key works. The citation list at the end of each short article provides an excellent tool for undergraduate students who are beginning a research project on any of the included authors . However, the addition of a cross- reference list would prove helpful in future editions. For example, students reading an entry on John Crowe Ransom might also be directed to consult entries on “Fugitives and Agrarians,” “New Criticism,” and “The Kenyon Review,” as well as related writers Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate. Such a list would also benefit those reading the more substantial thematic essays — for example , essays on “Southern Gothic” or “Blues Literature” — who might be encouraged to reference specific author entries. Contemporary writers appear more frequently in the new encyclopedia, as do influential publications and leading academics in the field. One possible addition, in light of the popular critical approaches that measure the cultural significance of space and identity construction, would be the inclusion of important southern literary festivals and events such as the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Oxford Conference for the Book. Transatlantic Exchanges proves both timely and relevant to the emerging concerns of transnationalism, and expands the definition of southern literature by connecting it convincingly, and with numerous specific close readings, to the larger traditions of English, Spanish, French, Norwegian, and even Welsh literature and culture. The core argument of this collection is that the U.S. South has always had a more heterogeneous cultural makeup than scholars have acknowledged. Extending this argument beyond the “many Souths” model that focuses primarily on African Americans and women as southerners, this volume looks to the influence of Latin American and Caribbean cultures on the South, and especially to the transnational and mutually influential relationship between the American South and Europe. Reviews 151 The study of Faulkner comprises two full sections of the volume (considered alongside Thomas Wolfe in some essays). Peter Laurie compares Faulkner’s place in French...

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JILL LEROY-FRAZIER East Tennessee State University Othered Southern Modernism: Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder ARNA BONTEMPS MIGHT BE SAID TO HAVE BECOME CONSCIOUS OF HIMSELF early on as a Southern writer of sorts, a designation less common among scholars than that of “African American author.”1 By the 1930s, following a sojourn in Alabama that reinforced his sense of connection to his Southern roots and further stimulated an interest in the history of his people in that region, Bontemps came to the conclusion that “The Negro writer, like the white writer of the South, is a product of the Southern condition. Whether he wills it or not, he reflects the tensions and cross-purposes of that environment” (“Negro Renaissance” 35). Bontemps frequently treated Southern themes in works such as the short stories collected in The Old South: “A Summer Tragedy” and Other Stories of the Thirties and the novel Sad-Faced Boy. Indeed, his novel Black Thunder holds particular resonance for Southern literary modernism in terms of the challenge it presents to the internal logic of the Agrarian fable that would come to be regarded as the whole of Southern modernism. By means of its focus upon a piece of Southern history that reveals the plantation order as unstable and under threat of collapse long before the Civil War—the 1800 slave revolt planned by Gabriel Prosser—the novel asserts that black Southerners have been active influences in the course of Southern history far longer than conventional accounts have been willing to acknowledge, and thus it challenges the very foundations of the myth that bolstered both the Agrarians’ view of Southern culture and their prototype of the Southern literary paradigm. Numerous scholars have observed the rigid apartheid of the modern Southern literary tradition established by the Nashville critics and 1 Bontemps most often is treated in terms of his relationship to African American literature and culture alone; see for example Carby, Grigsby, Reagan, and Sundquist. Other rubrics under which Bontemps has been explored include folklore (see Davis “Rhetorical” and Weil). More recently, scholars also have considered Bontemps’s work in the context of historiography and/or the philosophy of history (see Lane and Levecq) and materialism and radical writing (see Scott). 4 Jill LeRoy-Frazier writers who would become the Southern Agrarians. Michael O’Brien points out that in their own time, the Southern Agrarians were able to take racial segregation for granted in part because the larger society at the time did not question the arrangement and so they could “afford relative indifference” (17) to black Southern writers—and to the intertwining of black and white in Southern culture—in their critical formulations of the character of the modern South. Likewise, Michael Kreyling notes that “The principle organizers of I’ll Take My Stand. knew full well there were other ‘Souths’” than the singularly homogeneous version they promoted, yet “they deliberately presented a fabricated South as the one and only real thing” (xii). Rather, then, than the objective account of material history upon which they claimed to base their critical practice, “the Agrarians produced the South in the same way that all historically indigenous social elites produce ideological realities: out of strategies for seizing and retaining power . . . that are then reproduced as ‘natural’” (Kreyling 6). Certainly, though, the intellectual Agrarians did feel some need to attempt to justify their vision of the Southern social hierarchy in regard to race. O’Brien argues that while the Agrarians were philosophically unsympathetic to Romanticism because of its implicit affirmation of individual diversity in the form of harmonious, organic groups distinguishable from one another by any number of “natural” criteria and therefore preferred to declare their faith instead in the more standardizing Enlightenment notion of a uniform human nature which they used to advance their concept of a homogeneous South (4), their very sense of regional distinctiveness was fundamentally dependent upon the “devious legacy of Romantic social thought” (27) which they so derogated. Despite their hostile stance toward all things Romantic including the poetic tradition, O’Brien contends, the Agrarians’ “Southern myth” in fact “was the inarticulate stepchild of Romanticism” (27). The Agrarians seem to have misused both Romantic and Enlightenment philosophical...

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Southern Culture Research Articles

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Southern Culture Research Articles

Related Topics

Articles published on Southern Culture

The Heritage Fallacy: Race, Loyalty, and the First Grambling-Southern Football Game

A Patriotic Deus ex Machina in Flannery O'Connor's "The Displaced Person"

Front Porch

Owning Up: Revisiting Property, Education, and Race in the South

Growing Roots in Rocky Soil: An Environmental History of Southern Rock

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The Southern Culture of Violence and Homicide-Type Differentiation: An Analysis Across Cities and Time Points

Service Learning Through Disaster Relief

Front Porch

Reconsidering the Culture and Violence Connection: Strategies of Action in the Rural South

Randall J. Stephens . The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South . Cambridge : Harvard University Press . 2008 . Pp. xi, 393. $27.95.

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Agriculture and Industry (review)

Cataloging Southern Culture at Home and Abroad

U.S. Southern Cultural Studies in the Obama Era

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 11: Agriculture and Industry (review)

Southerners All?: New Northern Neighbors and the Changing Sense of Place

Give my poor heart ease: voices of the Mississippi blues

Nora: The Preservation of the Southern Thailand Performing Arts Development and Inheritance

Othered Southern Modernism: Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder

Le Mezzogiorno des écrivains européens/Europeans Writing the Mezzogiorno ed. by Béatrice Bijon, et al