Southern Fiction Research Articles

Lovers and beloveds: sexual otherness in southern fiction, 1936-1961

Lovers and beloveds: sexual otherness in southern fiction, 1936-1961

Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. By O'Gorman Farrell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. xi + 259 pp. $44.95 cloth.

Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. By O'Gorman Farrell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. xi + 259 pp. $44.95 cloth. - Volume 74 Issue 3

Ghosts and Shattered Bodies, or What Does it Mean To Still Be Haunted by Southern Literature?

"Ghosts and Shattered Bodies" argues that we must recognize a repetitive structure in southern fiction that depends on the trace or remnant to conjure the unthought of history. The blunt facts of racial trauma can be over-exposed, made facile, in the glam tropology of the gothic. This older rhetorical structure gives way to a shared hauntology in which simple fragments, residues, or traces of trauma fashion a regime of haunting. When white southern fiction makes these ghosts, it is clouded and driven by the return of the oppressed. Attending to starker tragedies, black fiction delineates the return of the dispossessed. While white women writers like Douglas and Porter focus on white children who miniaturize or repress memories of angry black women, African American women writers like Wright, Dash, and Morrison tell stories about what has disappeared but needs to be called forth again--about remnants of people who have been divested of property and can only return as a remnant or fragment that needs to be made into an integer.

Myths of the plantation society: slavery in the American South and the West Indies

Providing new insights into the origins of benevolent myths about the Old South, Dessens compares slave systems of the Caribbean and the American South from the early days of European colonization to the abolition of slavery. Her uncommon combination of historical and literary scholarship in a broad comparative framework explains why these two slave societies of the Americas developed so differently. She shows that underneath apparently obvious similarities, evolution of southern society and its West Indian counterparts diverged markedly, notably during debates over the existence of slavery. In both regions, climate and soil conditions favored the development of plantations that relied almost exclusively on the cultivation of such crops as cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton, indigo, and sugar and on the importation of other consumer goods. These agricultural economies required extensive manpower, and all colonial societies experienced a constant labor shortage. Both regions readily adopted the system of slavery. Dessens contrasts the institution in the West Indies and the American South, from its codification implementation to abolition and its aftermath. She also describes differences in both regions connected to their geography and varying status as territories. Her examination illuminates the emergence of a cultural distinction of the American South. Both before and after emancipation, antislavery forces found themselves defending their entire civilization, and the myth of benevolent plantation life - complete with paternal masters and contented slaves - was born. Southern fiction writers added their voices to the defense and wrote historical novels that glorified the Golden Age of the South. Dessens asserts that no parallel mythologizing existed in West Indian society, where plantation life was debunked rather than celebrated. In addition to primary sources such as diaries and slave narratives, scholars will be aspecially fascinated by Dessens' use of travel narratives, a fashionable genre in the 18th and 19th centuries, some written by American colonists visiting other colonies of the Western hemisphere and others written by Europeans visiting the American colonies.

Race mixing: Southern fiction since the sixties

In the southern United States, there remains a deep need among both black and white writers examine the topic of race relations, whether they grew up during segregation or belong the younger generation that graduated from integrated schools. In Race Mixing, Jones offers insightful and provocative readings of contemporary novels, the work of a wide range of writers--black and white, established and emerging. Their stories explore the possibilities of cross-racial friendships, examine the repressed history of interracial love, reimagine the Civil Rights era through children's eyes, herald the reemergence of the racially mixed character, investigate acts of racial violence, and interrogate both rural and urban racial dynamics. Employing a dynamic model of the relationship between text and context, Jones shows how more than thirty relevant writers--including Madison Smartt Bell, Larry Brown, Bebe Moore Campbell, Thulani Davis, Ellen Douglas, Ernest Gaines, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Reynolds Price, Alice Walker, and Tom Wolfe--illuminate the complexities of the color line and the problems in defining racial identity today. While an earlier generation of black and white southern writers challenged the mythic unity of southern communities in order lay bare racial divisions, Jones finds in the novels of contemporary writers a challenge the mythic sameness within racial communities--and a broader definition of community and identity. Closely reading these stories about race in America, Race Mixing ultimately points new ways of thinking about race relations. We need these fictions, Jones writes, to help us imagine our way out of the social structures and mind-sets that mythologize the past, fragment individuals, prejudge people, and divide communities. A valuable treatment of race and racial relations in the modern South as depicted in contemporary southern literature. No other scholarly work has covered this ground so thoroughly. Historically sound, theoretically sophisticated, and characterized by insightful readings of previously understudied novels, Race Mixing fills a real need in southern literary studies. --Fred Hobson, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Suzanne Jones is a subtle and nuanced writer, with a profound engagement with issues of race and gender, never oversimplifying the complex relationship between the two. There is a strong theoretically--and politically--informed intelligence at work here, and this exploration of black-white relations and the dialogues across racial and national lines is certain become a classic. The range of writers discussed; the insistent working away at theme and literary detail throughout; and the consistent attention socio-political as well as literary history: all testify a scholar working at the height of her powers.--Helen Taylor, University of Exeter Suzanne Jones's new study is a generous portrait of the landscape of recent, post-Civil Rights, Southern fiction. Meditative and insightful, Race Mixing will make it easier for the rest of us mark our own trails through that complex, varied landscape. It will become one of the places start understand Southern fiction of the last quarter of the twentieth century.--Noel Polk, The University of Southern Mississippi

Railroads, Racism, and Region: Re-Reading the Apocalyptic “Southern Grotesque”

This brief review essay examines the intersection(s) of numerous tracks—railroads and model railroading; race, class, and gender; southern fiction, literary criticism, and apocalypse studies; and both postmodernist and autobiographical or “story” theology—insofar as these converging lines shape the theory and praxis of men's studies and liberation theology and ethics, especially for white, southern, male scholars still struggling with issues of race and region in our various disciplinary endeavors.

To hell and back: race and betrayal in the southern novel

This study of the construction of race in American culture takes its title from a central story thread in Mark Twain's Adventures of Finn. Huck, who resolves to go to hell rather than turn over the runaway slave Jim, in time betrays his companion. Jeff Abernathy assesses cross-racial pairings in American literature following Huckleberry Finn to show that this pattern of engagement and betrayal appears repeatedly in American fiction - notably southern fiction - just as it appears throughout American history and culture. He contends that such stories of companionship and rejection express opposing tenets of American culture: a persistent vision of democracy and the racial hierarchy that undermines it. Abernathy traces this pattern through works by William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Kaye Gibbons, Sara Flanigan, Elizabeth Spencer, Padgett Powell, Ellen Douglas, and Glasgow Phillips. He then demonstrates how African American writers pointedly contest the pattern. The works of Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright, for example, portray autonomous black characters and white characters who must earn their own salvation, or gain it not at all.

Cultural Values in the Southern Sporting Narrative

This work covers classic southern fiction - along with lesser-known works - with an eye to the ways that southern writers such as William Elliot, William Gilmore Simms, and William Faulkner depict hunting and outdoorsmanship. It explores the themes of honour, fair play, and noblesse oblige.

Confronting Ghosts of the Christ‐Haunted South: Teaching Theology through Teaching Story

Abstract. Southern fiction writer Flannery O’Connor once characterized the South as Christ‐haunted, and having taught in the South for eight years now, I have come to appreciate O’Connor's evaluation. Most of the students I encounter understand one predominant way to practice Christian faith: assent to propositional theology. Most of them either accept this view uncritically or reject Christian thought completely, seeing it as stifling. My goal is to introduce the diversity of Christian thought in a non‐threatening way. Knowing story's potential to draw people into community as well as to transform consciousness, I believe story offers a less threatening way to invite students to explore diversity. This paper describes a course titled “Christian Thought and Contemporary Short Fiction,” a course I developed to try to introduce students to a variety of ways to understand Christian thought and practice Christian faith. The paper describes development and facilitation of the course, including student responses to the course content and evaluation of the course.

The Comings of Cousin Ann : Deconstructing the Southern Romance

To read Emma Speed Sampson's novel The Comings of Cousin Ann today is to discover an intriguing link between sentimental southern fiction popular at the turn of the nineteenth century and the more honest appraisals of the South credited to writers of the twentieth-century Southern Renaissance. I use the word discover deliberately, for though the novel attracted favorable reviews and a general audience when published in 1923, it has gathered dust for the past seventy years. Dated in some ways but modern in many others, it deserves a new audience. It will fascinate scholars and students of southern literature, cultural studies, and women's studies.

Languages of Mystery: Walker Percy's Legacy in Contemporary Southern Fiction

In 1975 the authors of Southern Literary Study: Problems and Possibilities posed the following query: "Is the introduction of 'alien' philosophical concepts into recent southern literature—O'Connor's Catholicism, Percy's existentialism—indicative of a significant change in the orientation and motivation of southern writing?" (235). Twenty-five years later, the answer to such a broad question seems both more readily within reach and perhaps—given Fred Hobson's assessment of O'Connor and Percy as, along with Eudora Welty, the dominant [End Page 97] influences on southern writers in the two last decades of the twentieth century—even more significant (8-9). The answer, I believe, is yes. My aim here, however, is not to address this question fully but rather to consider it briefly as a prelude to demonstrating just one way in which Percy's example seems to have affected the "orientation" of some recent southern fiction. In doing so I will ultimately concentrate at length on his legacy for two particularly keen observers of the contemporary regional landscape: Josephine Humphreys (whose work has been linked to Percy's before, though not in the manner I wish to suggest here) and Padgett Powell.

History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction

History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction

Advancing Sisterhood? Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction

Though black and white women have long been associated with the heart of southern culture, their relationships with each other in the context of contemporary southern fiction have been largely glossed over until now. In Advancing Sisterhood? Sharon Monteith offers an enlightening map of this new literary ground. Beginning with an overview of the theory and literary incarnations of friendship, Advancing Sisterhood? examines how prevalent specific relationships between black and white women have become in the works of Ellen Douglas, Kaye Gibbons, Connie Mae Fowler, Lane von Herzen, Ellen Gilchrist, Carol Dawson, and others. Monteith explains that interracial friendships have become an alluring topic for white women writers. She also examines these friendships in relation to the ways black women writers and critics have pictured black and white girls and women in the South. Advancing Sisterhood? explores childhood female relationships in such works as Ellen Foster and Before Women Had Wings and considers recent ecocriticism and its role in charting the female southern landscape. Monteith also provides an in-depth examination of the archetypal friendship between white housewives and their black servants. Through these discussions, Advancing Sisterhood? demonstrates how contemporary white women writers have broadened their work to include friendships between women of diverse backgrounds and to influence literary expression.

Advancing Sisterhood? Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction

Advancing Sisterhood? Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction

Expanding Southern Whiteness: Reconceptualizing Ethnic Difference in the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers

In Carson McCullers' 1936 collection of short stories, The Ballad of Sad Cafe and Other Stories, issues of ethnic difference, racialization, and negotiation of identifies play a central role. This is not surprising, considering that loosely imagined body of texts known as the Southern Renaissance has a strong preoccupation with these themes. Southern writers, both Anglo- and African American, have long fore-grounded question in representing and imagining New South following Civil War, and McCullers is no exception. Her characters grapple with what it means to be in South, what it means not to be white, and what it means to challenge or comply with standards of whiteness. However, what differentiates The Ballad of Sad Cafe and Other Stories from most other pieces of southern literature is relative absence of African American characters. If, as many theorists of race in United States have pointed out, notions of and notions of white are mutually constitutive and exist in a hierarchical binary, can whiteness ever be reconceptualized in a way that does not define it against and above blackness? In other words, can white exist apart from black? I argue that McCullers attempts to answer yes to such questions by introducing European immigrant characters into southern fiction. This gesture interrogates southern identity through means other than comparisons to black southern identity. It is important to note that absence of African American characters in this collection of stories is not an oversight that resulted from presenting some new form of ethnic difference. Rather, this absence is functional. It serves to isolate and explore in some depth a new valance of race emerging in New South without having to revert to well-trodden path of imagining racialization within black-white binary. McCullers' conceptual replacement of African American with European immigrant in her examination of racial and ethnic difference has its counterpart in southern labor history. During late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many southern states launched campaigns to attract European immigrants in response to labor shortages caused by black migration to West and Southwest immediately after Civil War and to North during Great Migration. For a South struggling to rebuild itself both economically and ideologically, European immigrant labor seemed a viable and even more favorable replacement for black labor. An avid recruiter of European immigrant labor in years immediately following Civil War, Richard Hathaway Edmonds founded a white-supremacist newsletter called Manufacturers' Record to provide coverage on southern industry and capitalism. Edmonds launched aggressive campaign to recruit laborers from Europe as a way to compensate for declining black laborer population in South. However, he intended for only immigrants of Anglo- and northern European stock to fulfill his goals. By 1880s, wave of immigrants from these areas gave way to those from eastern and southern Europe. This new influx of immigrants, Edmonds believed, did not assimilate properly and threatened Anglo-European racial integrity of South. By 1920s, Manufacturers' Record reversed its stance toward immigration, embracing nativist sentiments along with rest of United States and becoming one of most vocal anti-immigrant publications. Even if South's desire for immigrant labor had not been conflicted from start, region's attractiveness to European newcomers paled in comparison to that of North. Southern historian Martha G. Synott argues that South's attempt to lure and retain immigrants was doomed from beginning because it lacked high wages and inexpensive land that could be found in North. And from point of view of employers, southern landowners were more willing to exploit black labor because of their impression that Jim Crow laws regulated autonomy of blacks, making them more docile and reliable than immigrants. …

Advancing sisterhood?: interracial friendships in contemporary southern fiction

Advancing sisterhood?: interracial friendships in contemporary southern fiction

Revisiting the Southern Grotesque: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Case of Carson McCullers

form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art from is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, `I seem strange to you, anyway I am alive.' -- Carson McCullers, The Vision Shared Writers of the or gothic(1)--for example, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Flannery O'Connor--conjure up the strange worlds of freakish outsiders placed in lovelorn barren landscapes, penetrating heat, and closed spaces, with themes of miscegenation, sexual deviance and bloody violence. Perhaps not surprisingly, critical readers have, on the whole, concurred that the southern grotesque aligns itself with a gloomy vision of modernity, according to which the soul of man is both aimless and loveless. grotesque worlds of southern literature, it is argued, allegorize the human condition itself as existential alienation and angst. In my view, however, these accounts of the southern grotesque do not tally with the type of art which McCullers describes in the prefatory quotation above, as well as in other essays (for example, The Russian Realists and Southern Literature and The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing) and the fiction itself. McCullers, like O'Connor in Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction, accentuates the vitality of the grotesque vision. Without wanting to dismiss the real pain that is so often at the heart of the southern grotesque, including McCullers' writings, I want to suggest that the grotesque is not limited to an alienating modernity. Rather, it is to do with the affirming qualities and practices of growth, promise and transformation. What I am advocating, then, is a crucial need to revisit the grotesque. In doing so in this essay, I note different theories of the grotesque, and find Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptualization of it the most fruitful not only for describing the dynamics of McCullers' grotesque subjects, also for promising a radically new construction of how we read the southern grotesque.(2) I then perform a reading of McCullers' novels of adolescence--The Heart of the Lonely Hunter (1940) and Member of the Wedding (1946)--as an example of how we might reframe what I suggest are limited readings of the southern grotesque. Julia Kristeva first brought Bakhtin to the attention of western scholars with her 1969 essay, Word, Dialogue and Novel. With the translation into English of Rabelais and His World in 1968, and Dialogic Imagination and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics in the early 1980s, Bakhtin became a key name in literary studies, particularly in response to his theory of the novel. Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin's reading of Gargantua and Pantagruel, contains a revolutionary conceptualization of the grotesque that I suggest can free not just McCullers' fiction much southern writing from the almost paralyzing burden of more traditional accounts of the grotesque, to celebrate, instead, McCullers' pronouncement, but anyway I am alive. As I have noted, most readers of the southern grotesque submit that it allegorizes a kind of existential anguish. William Van O'Connor accounts for the grotesque in southern writing as a response to a world of violence and upheaval; Joseph Millichap makes a connection between the grotesque and a dark modernism; and Leslie Fiedler, in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), links the grotesque with terror and violence. More specifically, McCullers' worlds are said to represent alienation, loneliness, a lack of human communication, and the failure of love.(3) Although there is no denying the validity of these constructions of the southern grotesque, I do not think they tell the full story. …

Relocating Southerners in the West

Robert Brinkmeyer's subject is large, and his space is of ne cessity small since the book is structured by the three lectures he pre sented in 1998 at Mercer University as part of the Lamar Lecture Series. Like other Lamar Lecturers, Brinkmeyer was expected to bring a fresh di mension to the study of southern values and literature. He did not dis appoint; Remapping Southern Literature is a worthy addition to the distin guished critical literature that has emerged from the Lamar legacy. Anyone paying much attention to contemporary southern fiction has been aware that the American West looms large in the work of numerous southern writers, challenging older assumptions of the meaning of place in the southern psyche. In place of the North-South axis dominant in pre-World War II days, many contemporary southerners have tended to a South-West juxtaposition. Indeed, some of these writers have become much more identified with the West than with the South: Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and Barbara Kingsolver. McCarthy (who started writ ing fiction set in his native Tennessee) and Kingsolver (who grew up in Kentucky) respectively now live in Texas and Arizona. Both writers have earned chapters as western writers in Updating the Literary West (1997), a volume published by the Western Literature Association. Although Mis sissippi-born and now living half the year in New Orleans, Ford resides in Montana the rest of the year, and only his first novel is set in the South. Discussions of his work?like that of McCarthy and Kingsolver ?are frequent at annual meetings of the Western Literature Association. In the more transitory West, one can quickly earn designation as a west

Remapping southern literature: contemporary southern writers and the West

Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. studies current southern authors of western novels, historical fiction, and contemporary fiction who have been breaking the mold of southern literature by looking westward. The rich and diverse texts he examines challenge long-standing definitions of southern fiction and regional identity while reconfiguring the myths of the West that have long shaped American life. This effort points toward a new literary tradition and a new regional and national mythology that blends place and space, settlement and movement, community and individualism, security and freedom.

The Dead Mule Rides Again

Among many interesting things in Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin' (1998) is the revelation that Bragg's Uncle Jimbo once won a twenty-dollar bet by eating a bologna sandwich while sitting on a dead (xviii).(1) I believe I understand -- at least in a literary sort of way -- how Uncle Jimbo must have felt. My affiliation with dead mules in southern literature started close to forty years ago, when I was in graduate school up north in Massachusetts, working in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature and coming vaguely to realize that the culture I was studying was no less distant from me, in terms of much that I felt instinctively or by prior cultural absorption, than the one in which I was currently paying rent. To counter these feelings of nervousness and disorientation (I don't think people used the word alienation as loosely then as they do now), I took the more or less obvious solution of reading about what I'd left behind me, for a while, in the South. Not in any systematic or disciplined way -- I never took a course in the subject -- but in whatever spare time I could find, I read the fiction of southern authors I'd always known about but had never really looked into much during the years I was growing up and going to college in North Carolina. Did I find comfort, warmth, solace, and the confidence of knowing that I was part of something very richly textured? Some of each, of course; but mostly what I found was dead mules, an image that recurred with noticeable frequency in the novels and short stories I was reading. After the fourth or fifth one I started keeping a list -- mainly just authors and dries, page numbers if I remembered to; sometimes a hand-transcription of the relevant passage, if it was short. I lost these materials several times, but was able to recall most of them when I started a new list. After I returned to North Carolina to teach courses in the English Renaissance, I kept up my collection, which over the years took the form of jottings on scraps of paper stuffed into a manila folder. Sometime in the late 1980s I mentioned all this to Southern Cultures editor John Shelton Reed in one of the conversations we used to have about North/South cultural contrasts, and he began to encourage me to write my observations into an essay. I thought he was pulling my leg, but as years went by, other people lent support. The results finally reached print as an essay titled Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature of the Twentieth Century, in The Southern Literary Journal, 29 (Fall 1996): 2-17. As it turned out, more people wanted to know about dead mules than I had imagined. Jane Stancil described the essay in a Raleigh newspaper, and then Peter Applebome did a story in the New York Times, and Harper's magazine printed an excerpt last November. And now John Reed has invited me to provide an augmented and updated version, which I dutifully offer herewith, through the gracious permission of Fred Hobson and Kimball King, editors of The Southern Literary Journal. I have added to my original text such examples of the subject as have turned up since the first version was written--some I missed before, others referred to me by friends, still others simply stumbled upon as I continued to read southern fiction. My commentary is also expanded, especially in the endnotes. I like to think that my study is more or less innocent of theory, but nobody believes me. I often get some version or other of three questions: Are these passages real? Is the essay serious? Is it a satire? The first is easy to answer: yes, the passages are real, and you can locate them (barring typos in my references) just where I say they are in the books I cite. The second question is a little more difficult and requires a more subjective response, one that suggests how a dead mule may be more or less serious according to where it's found. A good illustration of this principle is in a story told by the late Beaufort County, North Carolina, humorist Edmund H. …