Southern Literary Tradition Research Articles

Southern Literary Tradition in M. Mitchell's Gone with the Wind

This paper studies Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind (1936) in the context of Southern literary tradition. After analyzing the settings, Southern images and the theme it concludes that this novel conforms to the features of the Southern literary tradition.

The Wandering Character in the Coen Brothers’ Films: When the Southern Gothic Meets the Western

The wandering character is a regular feature in the Coen Brothers’ films. Roaming the American South and West, two regions those directors have explored on various occasions, Coenian wanderers are mysterious, ominous characters, often grotesque, most of them undoubtedly having Gothic roots. If the image of the lonesome cowboy traditionally haunts classical Westerns, the bounty hunter chasing outlaws remains a key character of the spaghetti Western, and revisionist Westerns in general. Those archetypes can be found in their contemporary versions in Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987) or No Country for Old Men (2007) – movies in which the iconography of the Western is pregnant – and to some extent in Fargo (1996) which provides a re-reading of the frontier myth. Characters roaming the American territory in search of money or adventure are also part of the Southern literary tradition. The Coens admitted they had Flannery O’Connor’s works in mind when they created some of the characters in The Ladykillers (2004), or O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), both taking place in Mississippi. Dishonest preachers, traveling salesmen or runaway prisoners have replaced cowboys and bounty hunters in the Coens’ Southern films, but their whereabouts are always used as a pretext to discover American regionalisms. Finally, what seems to be a specificity of the Coens’ films is the phenomenon of hybridization between Southern and Western cultures which became very clear in Barton Fink (1991) and resurfaced in No Country for Old Men and True Grit (2010), laying stress on the influence of Gothic and Southern grotesque subtexts in which the wanderer plays a prominent part. Focusing on an analysis of the Coen brothers’ Western/Southern films through the critical tool of the wandering character, this article will seek to emphasize the possible parallels that can be drawn between Southern and Western cultures, in literature and cinema, arguing that the Gothic roots of the wandering character were transferred from European literature to American Western and Southern literatures and popular culture, thus becoming essential to the generic hybridization pervading the Coens’ filmography.

“Escaping from Gross Bondage”: The Divine Music of Augusta Jane Evans’s Beulah

REBECCAH BECHTOLD Wichita State University “Escaping from Gross Bondage”: The Divine Music of Augusta Jane Evans’s Beulah A SELF-DECLAREDDEVOTEE“ATTHESHRINEOFAESTHETICS,”AUGUSTAJANE Evans openly complained of the “lamentable want of aesthetic culture” available to southerners (“Letter to Beauregard” 66; “Letter to Victor” 14). She nevertheless wrote of the hope that one day soon “the youth of our country” would come to appreciate southern art in an 1860 letter to fellow writer Orville James Victor (“Letter to Victor” 15). Still, Evans’s novels proved to be the closest she would come to fulfilling her vision of a culturally advanced southern society. Working as music instructors, opera singers, artists, and writers, the female protagonists in Evans’s writings each possess the intellectual and artistictalentsthatdefinethem as both the preservers and producers of southern culture. For Evans, however, any creative and intellectual self-realization ultimately depended on the “nobler” goal “of doing God’s work.” (“Letter to Rachel” 18). Crucial to understanding Evans’s novels, then, is her religiously defined artistic vision. As she wrote to Walter Harriss in 1856, “O! I want an artist, and glorious works of art that will fill my soul with God-born impulses!” (Fidler 136). Perhaps tired of waiting for such a “glorious” art to emerge, Evans decided to produce her own, publishing in Beulah her only novel that overtly studies the tension between religious faith and artistic expression. This essay situates Beulah within a framework attentive to the social andreligiousdiscourseinfluencingEvans’sdefinitionoftheidealwoman of faith. Examining the extent to which Evans internalized the South’s conservative gender politics, I first consider the varied models of intellectual and artistic labor the novel privileges, arguing that while Beulah’s labor as author offers a viable source of financial stability, it threatens her access to more conservative definitions of womanhood in a manner Evans finds troubling. For this reason I maintain that Evans rejects Beulah’s literary proclivities if only to reframe them through a medium more suited to her ideal vision of art, that of music. When read alongside an emerging nineteenth-century spiritual soundscape that 140 Rebeccah Bechtold defined music as capable “of doing God’s work,” Beulah ultimately subverts southern expectations of gender, identifying in a woman’s creative expression both religious authority and social power. In the end, it is music, and specifically the Romantic prelude form, that best allows Evans to interrogate the limitations of Beulah’s artistic autonomy while still maintaining her religious faith.1 “Fame Don’t Pay”: The Southern Literary Tradition The first anthology of southern literature published in the United States, Mary Forrest’s Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1860) identified thirty white women writers who had successfully published in the pre-Civil War South, including “popular writers” like CarolineGilman,E.D.E.N.Southworth,CarolineLeeHentz,andAugusta Jane Evans, to name a few (vi). Anticipating the recovery work of scholars like Nina Baym and Mary Kelley who turned to the very same authors, along with their northern counterparts, to establish the reputationandculturalrelevancyofnineteenth-centurywomenwriters, Women of the South Distinguished in Literature. traces the longstanding tradition of female authorship in the South. Anne Goodwyn Jones observes, for instance, how “As writers, southern white women have had an active and highly visible history since colonial times. In numbers alone they outdistanced men before the Civil War” (41). Even though these women writers remain largely linked to a “fundamentally nonserious literary tradition,” their work nevertheless contributed in significant ways to the representation of the ideal of the southern lady (44). Although recognized in Forrest’s anthology as a woman writer who shows “bounteous promise” (332), Evans remains one of the lesserknown “literary domestics,” writing at a time when the “genre had run 1 R. MurraySchaferfirstdefinedtheterm“soundscape”inTheSoundscape:OurSonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. (8). Since then, sound historians such as Mark Smith, Leigh Eric Schmidt, Richard Cullen Rath, and Jonathan Rée have provided ample examples of sound’s centrality to our understanding of early American history and culture. See also Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies., edited by Kala Keeling and Josh Kun. Daniel Cavicchi offers a recent study of early American music practice while Candace Bailey provides a useful analysis...

南部文学の「伝統」と「テキスト」 : Noel Polk, Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2008, xii+207 pp.(私の一冊,関西英文学研究)

南部文学の「伝統」と「テキスト」 : Noel Polk, Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2008, xii+207 pp.(私の一冊,関西英文学研究)

The Critical Reception of Lewis Nordan

AbstractThe essay covers the critical reception of Mississippi‐writer Lewis Nordan from his debut in 1983 to the boost in scholarly attention in the new millennium. The essay covers newspaper reviews but pays particular attention to the many academic essays that have placed Nordan as a writer in the southern literary tradition and have highlighted themes such as magical realism, the grotesque, race relations, music, and gender.

Othered Southern Modernism: Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder

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...

Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition (review)

Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition (review)

William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition; Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition; Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

Faulkner and Welty and the southern literary tradition

Generations of southern writers and readers after William Faulkner have adopted his vision, seeing “The South” through his eyes rather than through their own or struggling against that vision. Writers such as Walker Percy and Barry Hannah, who deal with a more urban world than Faulkner does, have occasionally had a hard time with many traditional critics who believe that they represent a decline in “southern literature.” These are the same critics who have too often lumped Eudora Welty and Faulkner together, who have argued that their literary strengths lie directly in their roots in the South. One of Faulkner’s most intimate works, the quasi-autobiographical “Mississippi” (1953), depicts his attempts to grapple with the problems and pressures his native land had caused for him, as well as his reconciliation with past and present Mississippi. The questions of how and why love is better than hate, reconciliation better than alienation, are also present in Welty in general, and in her novel The Golden Apples in particular. However, Welty’s responses to such questions are quite different from those of Faulkner.

Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition (review)

Reviewed by: Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition Karen Michele Chandler (bio) Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. xxvi + 235 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). In this study, distinguished historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown turns his attention to how "the ethic of honor, the tragedy of melancholy, and the personal origins of artistic imagination" intertwine to shape a southern literary tradition (xi). The author of several important studies of southern honor, Wyatt-Brown seeks to show how concern with personal integrity and family dignity and fear of shame informed much southern writing. He finds that many southern writers suffered from a psychological depression that led them to pursue themes of loss, failure, and debilitation. Although some, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, and Ellen Glasgow, created distinctive, brilliant, even innovative literary texts out of these themes, most were not able to overcome the psychological costs of living and writing in accordance with a restrictive social code. The result, according to Wyatt-Brown, is a literature often marked by limitation, namely a lack of introspection and understanding of personal and social responsibility. The basis for nineteenth-century southern literature was protecting rather than interrogating the social order and the illusion of personal integrity (118). Nevertheless, through "a creative probing of death, ruin, and inner turmoil," Poe, Abraham Lincoln, and many others produced magnificent works "that disclose so much about the human condition" (228). Growing out of the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, Hearts of Darkness promises to be a work that could solidify common assumptions about southern literature, or, at the very least, reflect thoughtfully on some of its dominant themes. Just as importantly, it stands to address the ways writers as distinct as Poe, Twain, and the New England-born Constance Woolson manifest a southern character. Yet the book's genesis as a series of lectures is a major weakness, for its ideas do not adequately gel, and by consequence, the book is uneven. Although mental depression, imagination, and honor make an appearance in each of the book's eight chapters, the relationship between these three central ideas is not [End Page 141] weighed and revised consistently or systematically enough. In some chapters, writers' psychological demons help them create rich literature; in others, the demons, coupled with a tendency toward undiscerning romanticism, lead to doggerel. The discrepancy results, apparently, from some writers' investment in the pursuit of honor to the detriment of personal and authorial development, while others are inspired to critique the culture of honor. What is missing from Hearts of Darkness is a convincing explanation of how honor enabled as well as stifled the imagination, leading to searching works of psychological realism—such as Woolson's and Chopin's fiction—and satire—such as Twain's—as well as literature marked by reactionary stereotypes and plotting. Hearts of Darkness also suffers from Wyatt-Brown's conflating of writers' psychological problems with those of their literary characters or personae. In the chapter on Poe, for instance, he summarizes "The Black Cat" and after mentioning the narrator's murder of his wife and burial of her cat, ponders "Is it credible that Poe failed to recognize himself in the account?" (5). Similarly, in discussing one of Poe's most famous poems, Wyatt-Brown avers, "'The Raven' is the representation of the narrator's—and . . . the poet's—own melancholy" (17). Later, in noting some authors' use of pseudonyms, he comments on the way authors may "think of themselves not as single personalities but as two distinct beings" as a way to generate characters. "The authors slip into these fictional skins, as it were, and often they imagine that the figures created have an independent existence and direct the thoughts of their creator" (156-57). Of course seeing written texts as a simple reflection of a writer's psyche is a common mistake, especially with the admittedly troubled Poe. Yet Wyatt-Brown's work is most persuasive when he keeps in sight the complexity of the creative process and acknowledges the differences between text and selfhood. In one of...

Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition

Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition

Reviews of Books:Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Reviews of Books:Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Hearts of darkness: wellsprings of a southern literary tradition

Hearts of darkness: wellsprings of a southern literary tradition

Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition

Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition. By Bertram Wyatt-Brown. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 235. Illustrations. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $24.95.)In Hearts of Darkness, Bertram Wyatt-Brown traces the thread of depression through the lives and art of southern writers from Poe Glasgow. The figures he explores are familiar enough: Poe, Tucker, Hammond, Ruffin, Simms, Lamar, Lincoln, O'Hara, Chivers, Lanier, Timrod, Porter, Harris, Twain, Woolson, Chopin, Gather, and Glasgow. What is unique is that Wyatt-Brown brings them all together in a discussion of southern art and southern sadness. Certainly the private lives of these authors comprise a tale of staggering collective grief. Of the eighteen, nine lost parents early, seven lost children early, seven lost spouses early, eight lost siblings early, and nine lost their own lives early-one jumped out a window, one shot himself, one was murdered, two died of tuberculosis, and four drank themselves death. Then too there were tragedies that defy easy categorization. Twain witnessed his father's autopsy, Porter probably was raped in prison, and Simms lived bury eight of his children. Blood flows like a river in this book, twisting and turning through the hope-blasted South.What interests Wyatt-Brown, however, is what these writers did with all these awful emotions. Great literature, he contends, often proceeds from profound gloom. Art is a rage against the dying of the light, and night falls fast in the South, where pellagra and malaria, ignorance and backwardness, national defeat and a host of gray ghosts lay daily siege the artistic mind. In exorcising these haunts, southern authors transformed their personal pain and regional problems into a literary tradition that laid the underpinnings for modernism and the Southern Renaissance.Wyatt-Brown is careful, however, not give these authors too much credit, particularly the antebellum ones. Taking issue with Michael O'Brien and others who think the South produced a reasonably vibrant literature before the war, he presents a region preoccupied by honor and plagued by a failure to explore the interiority of personality, question old verities, the cruelty of social restraints, or the tyranny of custom (86). This establishes a foil for his culminating chapters in which turn-of-the-century southern women lead the way in casting off the South's repressive traditions.This makes for a tidy narrative arc, but make it work, Wyatt-Brown has pass quiet judgment on what is and is not successful art. This is an unenviable position for a historian. In the main, his criteria for success are sensible enough: art is successful the extent that it renders with complexity, sublimity, and fairness the turmoil and beauty of the human condition. …

Dirt and desire: reconstructing southern women's writing, 1930-1990

The story of southern writing - the Dixie Limited, if you will - runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white partiarchy and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture. For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labour and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt -who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it. Yaeger's theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies.

Campaigns Against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (review)

284civil war history of sex roles, their restrictions and limitations, and their pervasiveness in Southern society; "Race, Romance, and the Southern Literary Tradition " by Kenneth O'Brien, a comparison between GWTW and works that typified the late nineteenth-early twentieth-century Southern romantic literary tradition; and Pyron's own 'The Inner War of Southern History," an intelligent study of Southern culture, class distinctions, and social customs as interpreted by Margaret Mitchell. For anyone interested in the GWTW phenomenon, Pyron's anthology is excellent reading. The articles were well-chosen and are provocative as well as entertaining. My only wish is that perhaps one or two more studies of the motion picture version had been included; besides Cripps's essay, only one other dealt with the film—Gerald Wood's fine "From Clansman and Birth of a Nation to Gone with the Wind: The Loss of American Innocence." Still this is only a minor criticism of this work, which even contains a useful bibliographic essay by the editor. Recasting : "Gone with the Wind" in American Culture is good evidence that frankly, quite a few people still give a damn. Donna M. DeBlasio Youngstown State University Campaigns Against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America. By Myra C. Glenn. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. Pp. x, 221. $10.95, paper.) The pattern of punishment in a society reveals much about its basic assumptions : its view of human nature; its understanding of God; and its conceptions of family, hierarchy, and power. Recognizing this, Myra Glenn has studied a period in American history, 1820 to 1850, when that pattern was changing, especially with respect to corporal punishment. She defines corporal punishment broadly, to include the flogging of sailors and prisoners, wife beating, and the physical discipline of children by parents and teachers. Glenn emphasizes that antebellum campaigns against corporal punishment were motivated by diverse concerns. Some reformers, such as Horace Mann, had had bitter personal encounters with the rod or ruler. Some believed that such punishment was counterproductive, and that it ultimately diminished the efficiency, reputation, and order of institutions in which it was practiced. A rejection of Calvinism and newfound confidence in human perfectability led reformers to attack corporal punishment on theological and psychological grounds; their belief in republican principles and human freedom made them question whether it was a fit form of discipline for a democratic society. The whip was a symbol of barbarism and despotism, of unfreedom. They saw a close link between corporal punishment and both inebriety and slavery, which they also condemned. Not surprisingly, Southern spokesmen book reviews285 consistently defended thepractice ofwhippingagainst what they considered to be the naive arguments of meddling Yankee abolitionists, and stressed that the whip was necessary to keep the lower orders in line. The reformers disagreed. They were worried about deviant behavior, but thought it could be controlled by disciplining the mind, rather than the body. So other tactics were tried (e.g., badges of shame or "trials" by childhood peers), which could be equally if not more humiliating than physical punishment. Antebellum reformers were no prophets of positive reinforcement; for the most part they still thought in terms of punishment , even if noncorporeal. Reformers did not altogether rule out the use of bodily punishment. Glenn believes that racial and nativist assumptions played a role, that many reformers, indignant over the swollen knuckles of white, Protestant school children, nevertheless sanctioned whipping as a last resort to maintain order among black and immigrant criminals, foreign-born sailors , and other incorrigible types. They were also held back from a decisive attack on wife beating because of lingeringpatriarchal assumptions, and because the family was shrouded with a mantle of respectability that discouraged public discussion of marital violence. The idea that the reform impulse collided with, and was ultimately limited by, other cultural assumptions is an important insight and serves to unify the book. Glenn's periodization is somewhat questionable when it comes to familial punishment; recent works by Philip Greven and Daniel Blake Smith show that religiously liberal, upper- and middle-class families were treating their children more leniently as early as the mideighteenth century. Late colonial and early republican developments...

Ladell Payne, Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1981, $11.00). Pp. x, 117.

Ladell Payne, Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1981, $11.00). Pp. x, 117.

Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition.

Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition.

Ellen Glasgow and History: The Battle-Ground

That Ellen Glasgow was the grande dame of One West Main Street, Richmond, Virginia, is a fact known to everyone. That as a novelist she was from the beginning a part of the modern southern literary tradition and that she was shaped by the same fundamental impulses which went to make the “Southern Renascence” has been less widely understood. This fact has resulted in part from the circumstance that much of her work was written early in this century and that before the spectacular upheaval in southern writing which marked the 1930s, she had established a secure position, which she did not elect to desert when the winds of a newer modernism began to blow.

Telling It All: Literary Standards and Narratives by Southern Women

Literature, in the words of Alice Walker, is an effort tell immense story1-a remark which seems particularly applicable the women who have written in the Southern literary tradition. Walker's position is a significant one because it seeks enfranchise the works of women and blacks. It emerges from her own recognition as a Southern black female that the literary canon ought be whole. She elaborates on this in Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O'Connor: Though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin feel well read at all.,2 Unfortunately, the comprehensive experience of literature which Alice Walker seeks very often has been undercut by the development of standards, presumably objective and absolute, which have excluded the creative expressions of women, blacks, poor, and nonliterate individuals. As Louise Bernikow writes: What is commonly called literary history is actually a record of choices. Which authors have survived their time and which have not depends upon who noticed them and chose record the notice. Which works have become a part of the 'canon' of literature, read, thought about, discussed, and which have disappeared, depends, in the same way, on the process of selection and power select along the way. Such power select, in England and America, has always belonged white men.3 The effect has been, as Cheri Register describes it, make the female experience peripheral to the central concern of literature--which is man's struggle with nature, God, fate, himself, and not infrequently, women. Woman is always the 'Other.'4 Oral testimonies are one of the few available sources of positive, affirming images of ourselves. In a very real sense, every time someone dies, a piece of human, regional, and cultural history dies with them--lost offspring, neighbors, and scholars. Oral narrative and folklore encourage us determine our roots. They validate the significance of life as it is experienced by most people. Not only has a deal of human experience been left out of the literary canon through the continued use of exclusionary standards, but, additionally, the available literature of women, blacks, and poor Americans has often been conveniently relegated the category of literature, which is a way of saying that it is largely of local interest only. These works fail, in other words, embody those universal truths that are characteristic of great literature. Of course, the novels of Norman Mailer and John Updike are not classified as regional works, even though those of us living outside of the Up East literary establishment have no doubt about their bases in specific regions. Chroniclers of life in the cities and suburbs of the urban Northeast are easily seen as constructing works of universal import. To escape being branded a regionalist, it takes a rare Southerner like Faulkner--whose identification was the only factor at variance with the norms of literary greatness. (His race, class, and gender obviously fit the definition.)