Southern Literature Research Articles

Civil War Literature and Nationalism

Civil War Literature and Nationalism Timothy Sweet (bio) Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America. By Coleman Hutchison. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012. xiii + 277 pp. $69.95 cloth. $24.95 paper. To Fight Aloud is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War. By Faith Barrett. U of Massachusetts P, 2012. xv + 336 pp. $80.00 cloth. $27.95 paper. In his 1962 assessment of Civil War poetry, Edmund Wilson’s impatience with the rhetoric of nationhood led him to dismiss Civil War poetry as so much “patriotic journalism” and to praise instead poets who developed a “more personal kind of self-expression” by ignoring the war altogether (Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman) or approaching it only obliquely (Sidney Lanier). By 2012, it has become impossible to imagine that any study of Civil War poetry would not engage questions of nationalism. Coleman Hutchison and Faith Barrett each illustrate the gulf between 1962 when Wilson valorized the personal over the political and 2012. Each cites Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) to illuminate the way Civil War poetry expresses the relation between literature and nationalism. Each demonstrates with close-readings how texts shaped and were shaped by contexts of production, circulation, and reception. Although Confederate nationalism has received substantial scholarly attention, especially following Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Creation of Confederate Nationalism (1988), its associated literature has suffered neglect. As Hutchison observes, [End Page 136] most scholars have concluded that “there wasn’t much of the stuff, and in any case it wasn’t very good.” Without addressing quality, Hutchison demonstrates that “the Confederacy gave rise to a robust literary culture.” In examining this archive as a test case for Anderson’s account of modern nation-building, Hutchison looks deeply at a few instances, as compared for example with the broad survey approach taken by Michael Bernath’s Confederate Minds (2010). Much more extensively than Bernath, Hutchison emphasizes the international context of Confederate nationalism and its literature. Literary criticism, poetry, and popular song alike provide Hutchison’s evidence for the idea that the Confederacy was a “nation struggling to write itself into existence.” Examinations of the pro-Confederate, London-based periodical The Index and especially the long running Southern Literary Messenger demonstrate the importance of literary criticism. (Chapters on poetry and song will be discussed below in conjunction with Barrett’s study.) Readers may wish that Hutchison had also devoted a chapter to the genre of popular history—for example, Edward A. Pollard’s series, which began in 1862 and culminated in 1866 with The Lost Cause. Other genres bear disproportionate weight in his argument, as in the chapter on the Confederate national novel. By Hutchison’s count, only seven original book-length works of fiction were published in the Confederacy during the war, and of these only one seems to have been popular enough to support claims of cultural influence: Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria; or, the Altars of Sacrifice (1864). This text sold some twenty thousand copies (about as many as The Scarlet Letter sold during Hawthorne’s lifetime). Memoir, which emerged out of Confederate nationalism after the demise of its state apparatus, is represented not by the numerous examples that promoted a Lost Cause ideology but rather by an anomaly, Loreta Janeta Velazquez’s The Woman in Battle (1876). Whereas previous work has focused on gender, Hutchison’s new approach to this text by way of nationalism maps Velazquez’s geographical “restlessness” onto the international context of the Confederacy and the war. Barrett approaches the question of nationalism through poetic form, particularly “voice-effects”: modes of address, pronoun usages (actual or implied), song-like structures, and similar formal features that specify an audience’s relation to a text. Working in the vein of historical poetics opened by scholars such as Paula Bennett and Virginia Jackson, Barrett reminds us of the prominence of poetry and song in mid-century American culture. Arguing that the war reshaped American poetics as poets discovered new permeability in the conventional “boundaries between ‘civic’ and ‘private’ stances,” Barrett asks us to reconsider the definition of lyric subjectivity we have inherited from modernism. Chapters address popular [End...

New Book Notes

New Book Notes George Brosi Leonard M. Adkins and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Along the Appalachian Trail: Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Mount Pleasant, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2012. 128 pages. Trade paperback. $21.99. This volume, part of Arcadia’s “Images of America” series, presents over two-hundred historical pictures and captions that provide the reader with a sense of how the southern portion of this fabulous trail has developed. Leonard M. Adkins has completed the entire Appalachian Trail five times, and five of his seventeen outdoor books are about the AT. Leonard M. Adkins. Hiking and Traveling the Blue Ridge Parkway: The Only Guide You Will Ever Need, Including GPS, Detailed Maps, and More. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. 408 pages with 68 maps, 32 photos, bibliography, and index. Trade paperback, $18.00. This guide provides information that will be relevant to travelers: dining suggestions, public restroom locations, sightseeing information, and wildflower bloom calendars. “In the ever-expanding pantheon of guidebook writers, Leonard Adkins reigns supreme.” —Charleston Gazette Raymond L. Atkins. Camp Redemption: A Novel. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2013. 271 pages. Hardback with dust jacket. $25.00. Camp Redemption portrays the lives of a Willingham couple who own a failing Bible camp in the North Georgia Mountains. “Camp Redemption is as irreverent as any book can be, hilariously poking holes in the wind-baggery, Bible-thumpery, holy-rollery, hypocrisy, ignorance, and willful narrow-mindedness of organized and disorganized religion. Yet, through it all, a divine unseen hand is working out its plan. A marvel.” —Man Martin. Raymond Atkins lives in Rome, Georgia where he teaches English at Georgia Northwestern Technical College. Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos. Rot, Riot and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University That Changed America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. 182 pages with bibliography and index. Hardback with dust jacket. $24.95. [End Page 81] The authors, both former reporters for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, have intertwined historical facts with interesting tales from the period in a way that engages readers. “A lively, very-well told account of the university’s early, ugly years. The chronicle of drunken, loutish behavior is artfully handled.” —Peter S. Onuf Theresa L. Burriss and Patricia M. Gantt. Appalachia in the Classroom: Teaching the Region. Athens, Ohio University Press, 2013. 280 pages with an index and maps. Trade paperback. Hardback with dust jacket, $59.95. Trade paperback, $26.95. Theresa L. Burriss is the Director of the Appalachian Regional and Rural Studies Center at Radford University and the Chair of Appalachian Studies there. Patricia M. Gantt is Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of English at Utah State University. In this book, they have engaged some of the region’s foremost post-secondary teachers to share their best ideas for teaching about the region. For example, John C. Inscoe on teaching history, Erica Abrams Locklear and Jeff Mann on teaching literature, Ricky L. Cox on teaching the novel, and Grace Edwards on teaching poetry. Casey Clabough. George Garrett: A Critical Biography. Huntsville, Tex.: Texas Review Press, 2013. 209 pages with chronology, bibliography, and index. Trade paperback. $22.95. George Garrett (1929–2008) remains one of the region’s most beloved writers and educators. He was a crucial help to Appalachian Heritage in crafting our Winter 2006 issue commemorating the life and work of Mary Lee Settle (1918–2005) and, at the time of his death, we had a poem he had just sent us. “This critical biography helps to raise Garrett to his much-deserved position as one of the top luminaries of Southern literature and articulates beautifully the vast intelligence, wit, and talent of this remarkable man.” —Lynda Byrd Cook. Casey Clabough teaches at Lynchburg College and is also a frequent contributor to this magazine. Kim Clark and the McDowell House Project Advisory Committee. Marion. Mount Pleasant, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2013. 128 pages. Trade paperback. $21.99. Marion, North Carolina, lies at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This book in the “Images of America” series presents over 200 photographs with informative text on the development of the town. [End Page 82] Joe Cook. Etowah...

Envisioning Faulkner and Southern Literature

Envisioning Faulkner and Southern Literature

Trauma Studies and the Literature of the U.S. South

AbstractThe history of the U.S. South is one undeniably littered with traumatic acts, laws, and legitimized behaviors: racially biased laws that relegated Blacks to the status of disposable bodies denied by White culture; the regulated, segregated spaces of Jim Crow; and brutal, repetitive acts of violence that include lynching, incest, rape, and murder. This essay assesses the role that trauma studies, as an interdisciplinary area of investigation that came to prominence in the early‐to‐mid‐1990s, has played in assessing the ways that injury is troped, represented, and repeated in southern literature and its criticism. This essay first outlines the history of trauma as a theory, drawing attention to the fissures within the concept as it has developed over time, while also surveying the surge of works published under this rubric. The essay then assesses how trauma studies, with its attention to the nuances of testimony, the interlocked nature of personal and political traumas, and the importance of collective and cultural perspectives, has come to influence criticism on the literature of the U.S. South.

The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature by Tara Powell (review)

Reviewed by: The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature by Tara Powell Kathryn Lee Seidel Powell, Tara. The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. xi + 266 pp. $42.50. This comprehensive survey of the intellectual in southern literature begins with a title that sounds like an oxymoron. As Tara Powell writes, the stereotype of anti-intellectualism in the South persists, in spite of the many novels that, to the contrary, struggle with the myths and fragments of southern history by creating characters who are intellectuals and who wrestle with the world of books and ideas. The scope of this study includes many authors from earlier periods, but the focus rests upon modern authors, most extensively Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Doris Betts, Tim McLaurin, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, Randall Kenan, and Gail Godwin. Powell begins with a chapter on the origins of the southern anti-intellectual traditions prior to the 1950s. The Agrarians had consciously attempted to extol the myth of the South’s gentlemen farmers, but that effort displaced intellectual examination, according to Powell. Any text to the contrary resulted in characters who are exiled or failed intellectuals, such as those found in works as early as those by Edgar Allen Poe, and later in those by Thomas Wolfe and Ralph Ellison. Other authors adopt a satiric or ironic treatment of characters who are educated, as occurs in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! After World War II, Powell identifies the rise of the academic novel, the growth of creative writing programs in the academy, and the presence of “public intellectuals” as the new conditions that lead to writers who define and examine the intellectual life. Novels of the academy, such as those of Doris Betts and Tim McLaurin, and novels of writers who study creative writing, such as Flannery O’Connor and Gail Godwin, provide challenges to anyone who still believes that the South is an intellectual desert. [End Page 314] For example, Powell points out that O’Connor’s many college educated characters, such as Hulga in “Good Country People,” are often convinced of their superiority but limited and incomplete. Walker Percy’s characters, such as Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman and Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer, may be haunted by the old South, but they are just as disconcerted by modern science, existential philosophy, and atheism (Powell 65). African American authors, according to Powell, do not merely write but translate the parallel universes of the “black” and “white” Souths. Powell traces the strong intellectual tradition in literature from African American writers such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. This tradition, with its focus on teachers, literacy, and education, leads to novels such as Alice Walker’s Meridian in which Meridian Hill is committed to ideas, and to the actions that must result from them, often at great expense. Powell ends the study with a discussion of how Gail Godwin’s characters embark on intellectual journeys and often get stuck along the way in cul-de-sacs of idealism, found in books, in creeds, and in narratives about the values of earlier times, often propounded by mothers and other relatives. Godwin’s women not only live their lives but study them and those of surrounding characters, including their mothers and sisters, as in A Mother and Two Daughters, and their husbands, as in The Good Wife. Most students and scholars will find much to appreciate in this book, if only to situate a favorite author in a literary tradition that is not always associated with southernness. The book reminds the reader that southern culture is not all moonshiners and swamp people. Southerners have been particularly introspective. Powell makes the case well that southerners’ commentary on the life of the mind has always been part of southern discourse and continues to this day. The book has extensive notes that enrich the discussions too—so much so, that some of them might more gracefully be located within the text rather than at the back. The bibliography is extensive. Overall, Powell’s study convincingly proves that the South, far...

Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores! Oh, Didier!

Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores! Oh, Didier!

1119 Pinehurst Street: Selections from Native Ground

1119 Pinehurst Street:Selections from Native Ground Rob McDonald … we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost. —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space The photographs that follow are from a series called Native Ground, in which I use my camera to meditate on the relationship between place and imagination, namely as place—home—might be imagined as an influence or source of inspiration for writers.1 In a project devoted so substantially to the idea of place, it may not be surprising that I have focused on writers from the American South. This is not because I believe southern writers have any monopoly on the idea, but because “sense of place” is often the first concept that comes to mind when we talk about southern literature. Even if, as Martyn Bone has observed, “sense of place” has always been a “rather airy” phrase, it has persisted for a generation or more in the dialogue about what makes southern literature distinctive (28). When I talk about place here, I am talking about geography, but also and primarily about the mood and sensory textures of a particular location. I am talking about the aspects of being alive under certain circumstances that seep, often unrecognized, into our consciousness. If we are artists, it may be expected that those aspects bleed into our creative works, too. Such subjectivity can cause skepticism, I realize, so it’s important to acknowledge that the photographs in Native Ground are not so much documentary as they are themselves something of a fiction. This is evident in the style of these photographs: they are film-based images made with a primitive hand-held camera that is more adept at recording atmosphere than it is in capturing objective information. Equipped with a lifetime of reading and varying degrees of knowledge of the writers’ biographies, I visited these places with this camera, not to ferret out details that could be tracked back to certain works, but to imagine points of origination. Many people have asked how I chose the writers included in the project. The answer is simple: they are ones whose books I have loved and admired. [End Page 129] These photographs reflect my personal musings on how the places the writers were born into, constructed for themselves, inhabited, and absorbed might be imagined to have inspired vision and voice. In this respect, Native Ground is admittedly speculative, a creative act itself: a series of visual propositions of the convergence of physical space, a life lived, and art. The idea for the series formed late one hot Sunday in June 2007 as I stood on the back porch of the Erskine Caldwell Birthplace in Moreland, Georgia (pop. 393). I had just finished an assignment to make a portfolio of photographs of the small manse, which had recently been dragged from the red clay and kudzu and installed on the town square as a monument to the town’s most famous citizen (perhaps excepting its other literary great, Lewis Grizzard). The venerable Louis D. Rubin once allowed that Caldwell’s books were “unsurpassed as popular pornography,” but he was a better writer than that (153). His disparagers forget that Faulkner once listed Caldwell fourth in a ranking of the most significant writers of his generation—after Wolfe, himself, and Dos Passos, but before Hemingway (Gwynn and Blotner 143). In my academic career, I have published three books on Caldwell: two essay collections and an edition of his letters. But nothing, none of that work, prepared me for the experience of standing inside the small, bare-wood farmhouse where he was born, contemplating Caldwell’s biography in light of my readings of his raucous and confounding novels and stories of the dehumanizing effects of poverty. Here was where the son of a proper Virginia lady, never too fond of the Georgia backwoods, and an Associate Reformed Presbyterian minister, more bent on social work than saving souls, got his start. Moving room to room, ignoring the stifling heat and humidity, I imagined how the scent and texture of unfinished wood might have worked on the boy who...

A Nation of the Continual Present: Timrod, Tennyson, and the Memorialization of the Confederacy

A New York Times article dated May 13, 1899, quotes Alfred Lord Tennyson praising Henry Timrod as poet laureate of the (Thomas BR315). (1) Though the story is difficult to verify--Tennyson had been dead for seven years when the review was published--the title clung to Timrod and is still regularly used to describe the nineteenth-century South Carolinian poet. Less well known than Tennyson, Great Britain's Poet Laureate, Timrod nonetheless played a significant role in articulating southern identity during and after the Civil War. anecdote illustrates an important link between Tennyson and Timrod: each man served as a national spokesperson for his geographical region--Victorian England for Tennyson and the Confederate South for Timrod--in the midst of an unstable political era. While James W. Hood has recently identified connections between the gender politics in Timrod's southern community and Tennyson's imaginary world, little has been said about correlations between the poets' visions of nationalism. In fact, current scholarship overlooks most connections between the two writers. This is surprising because in the late nineteenth century, the literary world rarely mentioned Timrod without referencing Tennyson. In an 1886 article in Columbia's State, for instance, Maud Dickson describes Timrod as Tennyson of South Carolina (9). Similarly, discussions about Tennyson often note his influence on Timrod. In Sewanee Review of 1893, for example, Henry E. Shepherd compares Timrod's writing to Tennyson's In Memoriam, pointing to Timrod's appropriation of the peculiar rhyming combination of the poem (407). Shepherd writes: this renowned stanza has been thrilled with the breath of a new life by a Southern poet, whose lips were touched by a live coal from off the altar (408). (2) With rare exceptions like Hood, however, these numerous associations of the two poets have largely been left unexamined by recent scholarship. As a result, it is easy to minimize the complexity both of Timrod's work and the context in which it was read in the postbellum South. After publishing one favorably received book, in 1859, Timrod's writing became increasingly political as tensions between the North and South escalated. His appeared in publications ranging from local Charleston newspapers to Russell's Magazine to the influential Southern Literary Messenger, giving him a broad southern readership (Barrett and Miller 311). At the beginning of the Civil War, Timrod's imagined a South that had successfully seceded from the North and established itself as a thriving state. He used a poetic model to express his political argument and reflect the common rhetoric of southern secession. In Overreading Tennyson: Antebellum Appropriations of the Lady Poems, Hood asserts that Timrod and other American appropriators in the antebellum used Tennyson's poetry to advance their own political purposes by promoting a strict gender hierarchy (76). Hood contends that such as Timrod's (inspired by Tennyson's poem of the same name) replace complex females with flat, overidealized ones. Where Tennyson presents a woman who is paradoxically active and passive, strong and weak, assertive and submissive, Timrod gives readers a less complicated ... ethereally divine and completely submissive Isabel (79). While Hood maintains that such adaptations of Tennyson's lady poems point to Timrod's political agenda of subduing women, I suggest that these represent a desire to regulate not only women, but people in several social positions, including the African slave. I argue that Timrod patterns his independent southern nation after the Camelot of Tennyson's The Epic / Morte d'Arthur (1842) and Guinevere (1859), and that his vision extends beyond gender. He appropriates Tennyson's language and Camelot motifs for two related but distinct visions: first, in such as Ethnogenesis (1861), he imagines an independent southern political community characterized by a white patriarchy dependent on slavery. …

Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region and Literature. Thadious M.Davis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region and Literature Thadious M. Davis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.Inventive in its terms and specific in its conditions, Thadious Davis's Southscapes is a rethinking of (21). Intertwining discourses of geography, United States history, critical race theory, and literary criticism, Davis coins term southscape which calls attention to South as a social, political, cultural, and economic construct but one with 'fact of land' (2). She re-evaluates South under segregation and positions African American literary production as driving force of southern literature. For any explorer of American literature and culture, Southscapes is a literary cartography that maps social spaces black poets and writers in Unites States South have constructed over last fifty years.Following Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994) and bell hooks (Belonging: A Culture of Place, 2009), Davis extends and particularizes current scholarship on race and place by elucidating the spatial aesthetics and spatial economies that emerge out of segregation in Mississippi and Louisiana (4). She argues that signposts of segregation in Deep South region are-both literally and metaphoricallyre-appropriated by African American writers who use spatial language of exclusion to produce inversely a rhetoric of empowerment and regional inclusion. Southscapes multifaceted literary survey is devoted to recognizable works of Richard Wright, Ernest Gaines, and Alice Walker as well as lesser known works of Olympia Vernon, Sterling Plumpp, Etheridge Knight, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Shay Youngblood, and Randall Kenan. Davis's expert knowledge of Southern literature also allows for a dense, intertexual idiom that spans from William Faulkner to Harryette Mullen, to countless others.These authors' aesthetic sensitivity to demarcation of spaces spurs Davis into a reconfiguring of passage from modernism to postmodernism in South. She suggests that post-civil rights era is a transitional period in which the emergence of visible black artists, intellectuals, theorists, and philosophers to articulate changing state of African American life and to deconstruct controlling paradigms of power enabled iteration of postmodern blackness, as in cultural analysis of bell hooks and Cornell West (12). Although an underlying thread (11) of Southscapes, this re-configuration or paradigm shift is highlighted in both John W. …

Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy by Nicholas Monk (review)

Reviewed by: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy by Nicholas Monk Darryl Hattenhauer Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy. Edited by Nicholas Monk, with a foreword by Rick Wallach. New York: Routledge, 2012. 192 pages, $133.00. This anthology consists of three parts. The first addresses McCarthy’s fiction in comparison to literary texts from before the twentieth century. The second discusses his writing in the context of painting, film, and theater. The third analyzes McCarthy’s output in relation to literary texts from the twentieth century. The first selection, “Blood Meridian and Classical Greek Thought” by David Williams, is an erudite tour de force. He begins by showing the similarities between Blood Meridian (1985) and the Iliad. Then he discusses the Judge’s quotations from early Greek philosophers. Finally, he shows that the influence of the Iliad and pre-Socratic Greek philosophy makes Blood Meridian a traditional tragedy. Williams goes on to speculate that McCarthy’s work through the Border Trilogy constitutes an examination of the necessity of force. The author of The Western Landscape in Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner: Myths of the Frontier (2012), Megan Riley McGilchrist studies the traces of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” in All the Pretty Horses (1992). McGilchrist does not claim that McCarthy created these similarities consciously. Despite all of the differences between the medieval and the contemporary, it is apparently the underlying similarities between the two ages that lead to the paradigmatic and archetypal similarities between the two texts. Scandinavia’s foremost critic of southern literature, Jan Nordby Gretlund, chronicles the process of his thinking about McCarthy’s oeuvre, [End Page 429] particularly The Road (2006). He demonstrates how McCarthy fits simultaneously in national and southern traditions. In so doing, he makes arresting comparisons between McCarthy and James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, and Ernest Hemingway. The author of Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period (2009), Dianne Luce combines literary and art historical criticism to analyze landscape painting’s influence on The Road. In particular, she compares McCarthy’s setting and narrative point of view with the iconography and perspectives of the Hudson River School and the Luminists. She shows that the protagonist’s vision is congruent with America’s dominant landscape tradition. Especially noteworthy is her discussion of such art historians as Barbara Novak and David C. Williams and her inclusion of landscapes by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich. The author of Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism (2007), John Cant compares No Country for Old Men (2007) with its film adaptation. He focuses on the film’s inherent inability to capture the nuances of the novel’s narrative point of view. There is no technique in the film for adequately representing the contrasts between Sheriff Bell’s voice and the authorial voice. By the same token, the movie exceeds the novel’s ability to register sound. In another comparison of literature and film, Michael Madsen explores the motif of evil in Blood Meridian and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Hannah Arendt was right to indicate the banality of evil, but Madsen’s point may be even more important: that evil is ubiquitous, immortal, and inexplicable. Madsen argues that Blood Meridian’s representation of evil exemplifies the fact that McCarthy’s fiction is consonant with horror films. Like the other contributors, however, Madsen does not try to tease out the differences between horror, Gothic, and grotesque. Ciarán Dowd reveals the ambiguity that arises when critics discuss McCarthy’s alleged nihilism. In The Sunset Limited (2011), he argues, White’s ostensible nihilism “is just as much founded on faith as are Black’s religious beliefs” (115). Because White has values and beliefs, he is not a nihilist. Rather, he is a cynic—a moralist who rejects the dominant culture’s morals. When White uses the term meaningless, he means trivial. Euan Gallivan also inconveniences the notion of McCarthy as a purveyor of nihilism and meaninglessness. He builds on the recognition that McCarthy owes a lot to Samuel Beckett, especially in Suttree (1979). But he argues that it is not the Beckett of such famous works as Waiting for Godot (1948) to...

Notes on southern Africa Jerusalem crickets (Orthoptera: Stenopelmatidae: Sia).

The Old World Jerusalem cricket (JC) subfamily Siinae contains one genus, Sia, with two subgenera: Sia (Sia) with two fully winged species from southeast Asia, and Sia (Maxentius) with four wingless species from southern Africa. Because there is a dearth of published data about the behavior and biology of these insects, we present new field and laboratory research on southern African Sia (Maxentius), gather museum and literature information, and present guidelines for collecting and rearing specimens. While we make no taxonomic decisions, this review should be useful for future studies, including a needed taxonomic revision. We also compare results from these southern African JCs with recent investigations on related New World taxa, where fascinating biological traits and extensive cryptic biodiversity have been uncovered. DNA analysis reveals that these Old and New World JCs are polyphyletic.

Acadian Exile in the Georgia: Pelagie and Southern Literature

Acadian Exile in the Georgia: Pelagie and Southern Literature

MELANIE BENSON TAYLOR. Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause.

Melanie Benson Taylor explores a significant “family resemblance” between Native American writing and non-Indian culture in the modern U.S. South. Indian literature, she observes, displays a fixation on a Native American “Lost Cause” every bit as powerful as some white southerners' obsession with the Civil War and Reconstruction. For instance, Native writers dwell upon tribal histories of violent conquest and colonization much in the way that neo-Confederates endlessly revisit their ancestors' defeat at the hands of Yankee invaders. Native American literature also often invokes an idyllic tribal past comparable to the mythic image of genteel plantation culture. Both versions of the Lost Cause, moreover, sometimes express opposition to capitalism and a concern for issues of sovereignty and self-determination. Southern white and southern Indian cultures, Taylor suggests, overlap and inform one another to a degree contemporary observers seldom recognize. In pursuing the implications of this insight, Taylor examines the work of a large and quite diverse collection of Native American writers, from established figures like Louis Owens and LeAnne Howe to lesser-known authors such as Dawn Karima Pettigrew. She also draws extensively on the writings of contemporary Native American literary critics like Robert Warrior and Craig Womack. While much of this work attempts to express a distinctly Native outlook, Taylor places it within southern literature, demonstrating the extent to which Native American fiction and poetry perpetuate themes commonly associated with southern writing. She notes a powerful strain of nostalgia, for instance, along with a growing emphasis on retaliatory violence. She describes a southern Indian literature that is as haunted by history as any Faulkner novel. Taylor suggests that these common tendencies reflect a “southern mode of storying” (p. 65) tied to a shared experience of historical trauma and deprivation. She argues, moreover, that Native American writers did not simply appropriate these practices from an existing southern literature. Rather, the commonalities reflect a process of cross-pollination among defeated southern peoples.

Deftly Mixed: Liminal Identity and the Problem of Knowing in J. McHenry Jones’s Hearts of Gold

CHAD JEWETT University of Connecticut Deftly Mixed: Liminal Identity and the Problem of Knowing in J. McHenry Jones’s Hearts of Gold IN PARTLY COLORED: ASIAN AMERICANS AND RACIAL ANOMALY IN THE Segregated South, Leslie Bow describes the gap between “white” and “black” on the imagined Southern spectrum of identity as a racial “interstitial,” a liminal space where proximity to whiteness can be approximated and proximity to blackness attends questions of classed performance. Bow uses the interstitial concept to focus on non-white, non-black ethnicities (specifically Asian and Native American communities) and their experiences in the Jim Crow-era South. However, Bow’s concept of troubled racial epistemology is equally helpful in understanding Southern literary concerns of provisional whiteness and blackness. While Bow uses the sliding scale of race to examine Asian, Latino, and Native American proximity to the artificially stable poles of black and white, interstitiality can also apply to depictions of mixed-race (partially white and black) figures. A salient example of this Southern-literary liminality is found in the mixed-race character of Regenia Underwood in J. McHenry Jones’s 1896 novel Hearts of Gold, a work heretofore almost entirely ignored in American literary studies. While issues of racial performance and proximity are hardly unheard of in Southern (and American) literature, Jones’s novel is starkly unique in that his racial-regional formulations create a world in which Regenia Underwood, despite her unchanging performance, expression, and appearance, can be placed at the zenith of American aristocracy or in the confines of the Jim Crow car. Regenia “passes,”into themoneyedupper-classnoless,withouttryingtopassand is deemed “black” without ever fully understanding the situational rules she has broken by moving through the border between North and South. The extremeness of Regenia’s Northern and Southern experiences, combined with her inability to determine the forces at work in these external redefinitions, tells a story different from the codified “tragic mulatta” or passing narratives, making serious study of Jones’s novel all the more essential. Regenia’s novel-long conflict, a set of constant 180 Chad Jewett reevaluations of racial, regional, and socioeconomic identity, exists on a sliding scale of interstitiality, in which her race, like that of Bow’s subjects, is constantly subject to terms of proximity and performance, terms that Regenia is never able to master. In addition, the very era and region of the work’s genesis, the turn-of-the-century borderlands of West Virginia, provide an added layer of liminality, indivisible from that of Jones’s heroine. Regenia becomes a symbol for a three-decade struggle for national knowability that would only grow more vexed in the modernist twentieth century. The paucity of critical work on Jones’s novelisespeciallyoddconsideringtherichlycomplexracialandregional configurations that surround Regenia, a woman who seemingly manages to do the impossible in Reconstruction-era America: to exist simultaneously as both “white” and “black,” before seemingly becoming neither. Regenia’s interstiality and the ways in which her identity resists any form of perceived racial categorization or essentialness constitute two concepts vital to and interrogative of hierarchical senses of self in the post-Reconstruction era. Attendant to these issues of self-understanding and the multiplicity of identity are the modernist questions of epistemology at work in Jones’s novel, and how the seemingly unsettled nature of Regenia’s racial identity (and broader self-identity) reflect a modernist problem of knowing. Indeed, as Mark M. Smith has noted, racial identification became even more important to conservative white hegemony in the post-slavery era, just as “sight became ever less reliable as an authenticator of racial identity” (7), directly contributing to a defining facet of American modernist unsurety. WhileanequationofracialindeterminacywithAmericanmodernism is familiar in contemporary literary studies, the key difference in Hearts of Gold is that Regenia’s “problem of knowing” proves maddeningly regional.; the volley of outside classifications hurled at Regenia serve as a corrective to any essentialized knowability of the American nation-state itself, as well as of the subjects existing within it. Indeed, Regenia’s race seems to change as she moves from abolitionist northern Ohio, through the borderlands, and into the Tidewater South, before arriving in the Deep South. Such mobility, in what Smith calls “a modernizing, geographically...

Allen Tate: A Study in Southern Modernism and the Religious Imagination by Joseph Kuhn

345 Book Reviews Allen Tate: A Study in Southern Modernism and the Religious Imagination. Joseph Kuhn. Series Filologia 32. Adam Mickiewicz UP, 2009. 524 pp. $45.00 paper. IT MAY COME AS A SURPRISE TO SEE A RECENT AND LENGTHY STUDY OF THE work of Allen Tate and his influence on Southern letters emerge from Poland. Joseph Kuhn is a professor in the School of English at Adam Mickiewicz University (whose press is the publisher). We who have been engaged in what Lewis Simpson called “Southern self-interpretation” take for granted much that is perhaps unfamiliar to those outside the South. Yet a shift in perspective can teach us things we ourselves are inclined to overlook. It is one of the numerous merits of Kuhn’s book that it poses questions that might not occur to a self-interpreter to ask and highlights relationships that familiarity has kept us from probing. For this reason alone, the book makes interesting reading, though it does a great deal more. After an introduction entitled “A Model of Order,” in which Kuhn explores the implications of the Old South as “a metaphor of spiritual and artistic community,” he offers four stages in the sources, development, maturation, and influence of Tate’s thought: “Beginnings in New England,” “The Two Masters,” “A Modernist Metaphysical: Tate’s Poetry,” and “The Historical Imagination.” The first section offers a good example of what commentators on Southern literature seem to have overlooked: the neo-medievalism of that class of scholars in the nineteenth century called the “Boston Brahmins,” in particular that of Henry Adams, who represented “an awkward paternity” for both T. S. Eliot and Tate. Kuhn has some very acute observations about the crisis of historical relativism that Adams addressed but failed to solve. Nevertheless, his writings provided an important,ifambiguous,precedentfor“traditionalistmodernism.”Eliot, a combination of collateral Brahmin through his New England ancestry and quasi-Southerner because of Missouri’s uncertain regional status, depicted Adams’s dilemma in his “Gerontion,” which Kuhn analyzes at some length and then goes on to explore this intellectual context and make a convincing case for its relevance. In the second section, he further examines the main components of Tate’s inheritance from his two principal literary mentors, Eliot and Ransom. He focuses on the modernist version of traditionalism proposed by the former and the “curious theology” presented by the latter in his God Without Thunder, showing in each instance how Tate built on 346 Mississippi Quarterly and—in Ransom’s case especially—modified their ideas. He challenges the notion that Tate was simply a Southern version of Eliot. In a detailed reading of Ransom’s book, he shows how the disciple diverged significantly from the master, who nevertheless showed him a way to rethink the importance of religion in culture and society and of religious myth as a critical concept—key elements in the thought of all three men. Kuhn warns that this “religious imagination” does not designate mere piety but a longing for the transcendent and the tensions, ironies, and conflicts that arise from such a quest for the whole. The central and, by far, longest section is the third, devoted to a number of close readings of individual poems, early and late, as well as to Tate’s novel, The Fathers. The organization of these pages is thematic in basis but broadly chronological. Throughout his book, Kuhn draws on key passages from the poetry and prose, reinforcing and exploring their nuances by constantly placing them in new contexts. He draws on the rich array of philosophical and literary theory at his command, from Augustine, Aquinas, and Abelard toRicoeur,Levinas,andDerrida,tosay nothing of a host of other contemporary thinkers on whom he draws tellingly to illustrate how enduring are the questions that Tate confronted during his lifetime. Those who know the poetry well will discover many insightful interpretations of individual passages and whole poems. The fourth part of the book is given over to three “Tateians”: Richard Weaver, Lewis Simpson, and Walker Percy. Kuhn does not mean to imply that these three men were necessarily disciples. Rather, he sees in them a continuation of the main concerns of a man...

Revolution of Thought/Revulsion of Feeling: Edgar Allan Poe and the Interest Concept

Revolution of Thought/Revulsion of Feeling:Edgar Allan Poe and the Interest Concept Sean McAlister (bio) Style to the idea is like enamel to the tooth. —Victor Hugo, quoted by Edgar Allan Poe, “Critical Notices,” Southern Literary Messenger (1835)1 [R]eally valuable ideas can only be had at the price of close attention. —Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1992)2 There is no indifference to material reality in Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, despite an older critical tradition that took his well-known opposition to “the heresy of The Didactic” to suggest otherwise.3 Poe’s protagonists—his lovers, his criminals, his cadavers and near-cadavers—almost always suffer from a variation of the “nervous intensity of interest” that leads Egaeus to fixate with ultimately disastrous consequences on the teeth of his eponymous beloved in “Berenice,” the tale at the center of my analysis in this essay.4 In his cosmological essays and his tales of mesmerism, Poe’s narrators and dialogists evince what Agathos, in “The Power of Words,” describes as a “deep interest” in the dizzying connectedness of the material universe.5 In his critical essays and reviews, too, Poe displays an abiding concern with the ways that readers invest, sustain, and are rewarded for their interest in reading, the material response to which he names “the poetic effect.” In all these instances of “interest” in Poe’s work, the foundations of disinterested aesthetic contemplation are being unsettled. But, as I will argue in this essay, Poe’s critique of disinterested contemplation should be read as a conformation or adaptation of the category of the aesthetic rather than a rejection of it. If, as Friedrich Schlegel observed [End Page 471] near the end of the eighteenth century, the aesthetic turn toward das Interessante was coeval with the historical emergence of the novel, Poe goes a step further by celebrating, in his own analyses of the psychological implications of Modernity on literary form, the forceful brevity and “unity or totality of effect” associated with the “short prose tale”:6 “During the hour of perusal,” he explains in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales, “the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control.”7 Readerly interest—and not disinterest, the more famous prerequisite of aesthetic judgment—turns out to be the key term for engaging Poe’s aesthetics of the literary commodity. Some Poe scholars, including Meredith McGill and Terence Whalen, have minimized the significance and originality of Poe’s aesthetic theories, focusing instead on the ways his work responded to market instabilities, the cultures of piracy and reprinting, and other contingencies of antebellum authorship, as a kind of corrective to the long-running (and mostly Continental) trend of viewing Poe as an aesthete and an “isolato” (to borrow Herman Melville’s descriptor of himself and Hawthorne).8 Without contesting any of these historicizations, however, I’d like to suggest that Poe’s most enduring and innovative responses to what Jonathan Elmer calls the “figure” of mass print culture are aesthetic ones—that is, responses that treat the aesthetic as a field for experimentation with the new circumstances of authorship in the antebellum United States.9 This essay argues that Poe’s theory of interest—which he develops through a pattern of counterpoints to Kantian disinterest—constitutes one such significant structure of response to the bewildering state of aesthetic contemplation in mass culture. Poe’s writing can be figured, then, at the nexus of eighteenth-century aesthetic discourses that are grounded through Immanuel Kant’s disinterested and subjectively universal power of judgment and an emergent nineteenth-century aesthetics of interest that is antifoundational and more differentiable in its effects than the Kantian scheme. A surprising consequence of Poe’s aesthetic adaptations, which I also examine, is that his theory of interest ends up resonating with some of the later-nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in American thought that have come to be grouped as Pragmatism; the pragmatists’ recurring attention to interest, in this sense, can be understood as continuous—both conceptually and historically—with Poe’s own interested manipulations of the eighteenth-century category of the aesthetic. Writing about Poe’s frequent...

“You Have Even Been to Lady School”: Pierre Bourdieu, Lee Smith, and New Gender Theory for Southern Literature

“You Have Even Been to Lady School”: Pierre Bourdieu, Lee Smith, and New Gender Theory for Southern Literature

Reviewing the South: Lillian Smith, South Today, and the Origins of Literary Canons

JORDAN J. DOMINY Savannah State University Reviewing the South: Lillian Smith, South Today, and the Origins of Literary Canons WHILE CLASSROOMS OF UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES SEEM THE FRONT LINES in the academic study of literature, literary and critical periodicals have served an important role in forming dominant ideas about American literature and culture. At no time was this truer than during the years leading up to and during World War II, when English departments as we know them today began to emerge, influenced greatly by novel critical approaches and the model of scholarly discourse conducted through the literary quarterly. Many successful quarterlies found university backing, and some, such as Kenyon Review and Southern Review, were edited by English professors who promoted the New Criticism. Unsurprisingly, its tenets became the dominant mode of engagement with literature in classrooms and scholarship for a generation. However, attempts to influence notions about literature have not been limited to large quarterlies with strong circulation numbers. Smaller, non-academic periodicals have certainly had agendas concerning the best purpose for literature, its scholarship, and canonicity. South Today, a small literary magazine edited and published by Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling out of Clayton, Georgia, from 1936 to 1945, highlights this agenda in the particular case of literatures of the US South. The concurrent publication of South Today with major critical quarterlies demonstrates important, divergent trends in how intellectuals and authors in the United States were thinking at that time about the canonicity and the institutionalization of literary studies because of its attention to global politicalandsocialissuesinaliterary,regionalcontext.Scholarlyinterest in a canon of Southern literature arose during the World War II years and coincided with a collective desire for a national literature of democratic values, a desire that eventually led South Today into obscurity. Placing South Today in dialogue with more recognizable quarterlies and the larger magazine culture of the early to middle twentieth century in terms of purpose, editorial policy, and scholarly approach is quite 30 Jordan J. Dominy fruitful, especially in terms of revising predominant narratives of the modern as related to the development of the formalized study of Southern and American literature. Indeed, as George Core stated at a conference on Southern letters celebrating the fiftieth year after the founding of Southern Review.: The critical quarterly as we now know it was largely founded in response to modernism—to the work of writers like Ford,Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Joyce. At first, magazinessuchasFord’sEnglishReviewandhisTransatlanticReviewwereintended primarily to provide outlets for fiction and poetry; then increasingly the emphasis turned to criticism—a criticism that would explain the obscure and pithy indirectionsofthemodernistmannerandstylebypenetratingitsmasks,illuminating its shadowed modes, and translating its muted voices. The major American literary quarterlies since 1935—the Southern, Kenyon, Sewanee, and Hudson reviews—therefore have existed largely to explain modern literature. (190) This suggests that the advent of scholarly literary reviews was a definitive early indicator of the late modernism Fredric Jameson defines asthe“ideologyofmodernism,”thatis,thecodificationandcanonization by intellectuals, art critics, and literary critics of the artistic practices and works of pre-war modernists, especially high modernists. Jameson calls late modernism “an American invention” and “a product of the Cold War” (165). With strict adherence to codified modernist aesthetics, late modernism valued form over content, and Jameson points to the New Criticism as a key factor in the late modernist turn. Such emphasis in art and literature became significant in the post-war years for America’s battle against communism because it enabled the intelligentsia to keep leftist and progressive politics in check. For late modernism, Jameson explains, “high literature and high art mean the aesthetic minus culture, the aesthetic field radically cleansed and purified of culture” (179). Art and literature with all of its contexts—political, social, or otherwise —strippedbecomes democratically safe, but only in regardstotechnique and forms. The purging of contexts came on the heels of a leftist turn in American culture during the Great Depression, as union membership increased and artists, writers, and intellectuals became more active in leftist politics. At nearly the same moment that publications such as Partisan Review and New Masses began to define and extol to young, aspiring writers a proletarian literature that joined working-class realities,radicalpolitics,andartisticinnovation(Denning201...

CHINESE HISTORICAL NOVELS AND VIETNAMESE HISTORICAL NOVELS IN THE SOUTH OF VIET NAM AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20th CENTURY

At the beginning of the 20th century, novel translation from foreign languages into the national language has played a constructively role in the modernization process of local literature in Viet nam and other Asian countries as well. In the south of Viet nam, the movement of translation of Chinese historical novels has ebulliently occurred, and has influenced the composing tendency of local historical novels – one of the most outstanding trends of southern literature at that time. We have studied on the conversional Meclanism, the exchanges and interactions and the influence of translating activities of Chinese historical novels on compasing activities of Vietnamese historical novels, especially the literature of the southern of Vietnam in the early years of the 20th century.

HISTORICAL NOVELS OF PHAM MINH KIEN

Based on the introduction of Pham Minh Kien’s literary career, together with the analysis of his novels, this paper affirms that Pham Minh Kien is a historical novel writer, and that he has made significant contributions to the Southern literature in particular and to Vietnamese literature in general at the first half of the twentieth century.