Southern Renaissance Research Articles

Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South (review)

Reviewed by: Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South Jason Phillips Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South. Michael T. Bernath. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8078-3391-9, 432 pp., cloth, $39.95. For generations, historians have debated the strength of Confederate nationalism by first defining "nationalism" and then searching Confederate records for evidence of their defined term. In Confederate Minds, Michael Bernath takes an elegantly simple alternative: he accepts how his subjects, Confederate cultural nationalists, defined nationalism, studies their attempts to achieve it, and analyzes their assessment of its failure. The result is a bracing insider's perspective into the Confederate rush to print southern distinctiveness and supremacy into existence through poetry, fiction, periodicals, sermons, textbooks, and plays. This book has many strengths, but its most enduring contribution may be the enormous load of Confederate publications Bernath unearths and describes. No future historian can claim that wartime conditions muffled southerners' public cries for nationalism. The evidence Bernath has collected reveals a dogged determination among Confederate [End Page 277] cultural nationalists to prove southern distinctiveness by publishing partisan literature to the war's bitter end. According to Bernath, Confederate cultural nationalists were a diverse conglomerate of writers, editors, educators, ministers, philosophers, political theorists, and others who sought Confederate intellectual independence by writing and publishing native literature that confirmed southern distinctiveness and supremacy. Bernath chooses not to call his subjects intellectuals, because most of them were not great thinkers or artists but rather " facilitators of culture" who cultivated the ground from which great southern literature and art would sprout (4). He divides his analysis of their efforts into four chronological parts. The first section of the book studies how secession sparked a call to arms among Confederate cultural nationalists who were determined to free the South from its "intellectual vassalage" to the North (13). In a basic sense, secession forced southerners to provide their own literature, textbooks, and periodicals, because the antebellum South had depended so heavily on the North for its reading material. Beneath this practical concern, however, was a widespread belief among Confederate cultural nationalists that political independence could not be realized until the South established an intellectual and cultural autonomy that legitimized the new nation and gave its military triumph a deeper meaning. The second part of the book recounts the birth of Confederate periodicals and textbooks during the nation's first year. Despite wartime challenges and humble beginnings, Confederate editors and educators rallied to the cause with surprising speed and early success. Confederate cultural nationalists had reasons to hope that southern intellectual autonomy was imminent. The third quarter of the book focuses on the middle years of the war, when Confederate cultural nationalism reached its high-water mark. Southern publishers bombarded southern readers with original Confederate periodicals, histories, novels, poetry, textbooks, children's literature, and theatrical works. This dramatic rise in print culture convinced Confederate cultural nationalists that their anticipated southern renaissance had arrived. They were wrong. In the last section of the book, Bernath studies the failure of Confederate cultural nationalism during the war's final year and its aftermath. Despite mighty efforts to stay in print as Union forces occupied the South, Confederate cultural nationalists realized that their bid for intellectual independence had failed internally because the South did not produce great native literature. Even the most partisan southern editors had to admit that the Confederacy [End Page 278] lacked a literary masterpiece. While the quantity of Confederate publishing was impressive, the quality was not. This fascinating conclusion to the Confederate bid for cultural autonomy is one of the most significant discoveries in Bernath's excellent book. As he argues, "Northern armies may have stopped Confederate presses but they were not the reason why the struggle for intellectual independence failed. Despite their repeated and forceful assertions of southern cultural distinctiveness, Confederate nationalists could not demonstrate it, even to their own satisfaction" (290). Unlike other nationalist movements in nineteenth-century Germany, France, and Italy, the Confederate bid for cultural distinctiveness began with no physical means to print its own literature, let alone to distinguish itself by producing...

White Woman, Indian Chief: Beatrice Ravenel and the Poetic Consciousness of Captivity

REBECCA HARRISON University of West Georgia White Woman, Indian Chief: Beatrice Ravenel and the Poetic Consciousness of Captivity1 I run the gauntlet like a savage captive, Torn into ravellings Not by the spears of men but by the gold pins of the women! –“The Selfish Woman,” Beatrice Witte Ravenel WHEN THE CHARLESTON POET BEATRICE WITTE RAVENEL PUBLISHED HER collection of poetry The Arrow of Lightning in 1926, she displayed a keen interest in the Carolina Low Country and in the writing of history. Ravenel’s most remembered poems in this collection, the only one published in her lifetime, concern the Yemassee Indians; in these poems, as Susan Donaldson argues, Ravenel’s poetic voice, embodied by the mockingbird, the totem of the Yemassee, becomes “a daring and resourceful thief, a ‘Trick-tongue’ that steals the music of others and deceives its listeners” (184). Associating this mockingbird with her own poetic axis, Ravenel writes, “You are no dryad, / No young squaw of trees; / You are a conjurer. / You sing the songs of all birds with a difference” (The Arrow 22). Ravenel uses this voice, one capable of transmutation, to challenge narratives that marginalize or demonize native cultures. The narrator captures the echoes of native history in order “To tell of the passing of nations, / Of the exquisite ruin of coasts, of the silvery change and / the flux of existence” (The Arrow 24). In effect, Ravenel frees her subject from mainstream narratives that I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Tom McHaney for his advice on Ravenel’s unpublished poem “Sanute the Chief.” I would also like to thank Noel Polk and an anonymous reader for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. The Southern Historical Society at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill made this work on Ravenel possible through the John Eugene and Barbara Hilton Cay visiting scholar grant. I am indebted to Laura Clark Brown and her staff who facilitated my research while at the collection. The Wilson Library at UNC and the Houghton Library at Harvard University graciously gave permission to publish selections from the Ravenel and Lowell papers. 152 Rebecca Harrison justified westward expansion and violence against native peoples.1 This concern with otherness and the consequences of colonization locate themselves not only in the reemployment of the tribal voice of the Yemassee, but more specifically through the use of tropes originating in the early American captivity narrative, which Ravenel, like many Southern women writers, strategically employs to critique identity borders maintained by white male agendas. Beatrice Witte Ravenel is a remarkably understudied figure in the canon of the Southern Renaissance, even within the female tradition of the period. Though greeted with positive critical reception, numerous accolades from the Poetry Society of South Carolina, and the attention of renowned authors such as Amy Lowell, her work faded into the margins of the Southern literary landscape until Louis D. Rubin, Jr. attempted to revive interest in her poetry in his 1969 edition titled The Yemassee Lands. His introduction to this collection positions Ravenel’s work as “better than any other poetry being written in the South . . . outside of Nashville”—quite the compliment in 1960s scholarship to place a woman alongside the Fugitives—and he hails her work as “worthy of lasting attention” (5). Yet in spite of Rubin’s attempt, the field has seen only two article-length publications and one dissertation chapter devoted entirely to this important figure. The bulk of her verse remains in relative obscurity and her contribution localized to her participation in the Poetry Society of South Carolina. My goal in this essay is thus two-fold. First, I want to make a case, through a focused study of Ravenel, for looking at the influence of the genre of captivity narratives on the women writers of the modern South. Second, while my interests lie in her use of captivity tropes and images of early America, I contend that there is a need for broader critical engagement with the full range of Ravenel’s published and unpublished work.2 Beatrice Witte was born in 1870 to Charles Otto and Charlotte Witte and grew up in Charleston society where she enjoyed numerous...

The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930–1950 (review)

Reviewed by: The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930–1950 Michael Kreyling Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930–1950. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009. xv + 413 pp. The Fourth Ghost is Robert Brinkmeyer’s fifth book, but its genesis, as he reminisces in the “Acknowledgments,” is at least twenty years in the past. The long gestation gives The Fourth Ghost a peculiar anachronistic quality—peculiar, because Brinkmeyer admits, in the “Introduction” and “Coda,” southern literary studies has molted since his project first sprouted. What began as a contribution to southern literary studies (The Fourth Ghost is published in the long-lived and durable series of that name) has matured in the era of “the new southern studies” (2, fn.3) or studies in “the global South” (2, 310). In his footnote positioning The Fourth Ghost in “the global South,” Brinkmeyer salutes some of the work renovating [End Page 417] the field. But The Fourth Ghost is literary study of tried-and-true design: driven by a straightforward, paradigmatic thesis; bolstered by evidence mined from biographies and published collections of letters; and demonstrated by clear and concise readings of literary texts. Brinkmeyer sums up his thesis: “this book argues . . . that rather than being turned incestuously inward, white southern writers during these two decades [1930–1950] were actually turned fearfully outward, haunted by the ghostly presence of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (and, to a lesser extent, as another manifestation of totalitarianism, the Soviet Union)” (2). The importance of this redirection to the field of southern studies is potentially great: almost all of the scholarly foundation rests on the consensus that these decades, identified usually as “the Southern Renaissance,” incubated all that was crucial to southern literature in the twentieth century. For Brinkmeyer to maintain that it wasn’t the South itself that fueled the “Renaissance” (2) but rather “Europe” is a major intervention (22–23). But there are problems with the thesis. Generally, paradigmatic theses like this one tend to scout the territory from an aerial view. Ground-level distinctions lose their sharp edges. For example, “Europe,” as Brinkmeyer uses the term, tends to steer him away from real differences. Among the Agrarians, the group under examination in his first chapter, “Europe” meant different things to different members. To John Crowe Ransom, it meant the eighteenth-century squirearchy of England; to Allen Tate it meant France; to Robert Penn Warren it meant Italy. In the chapter reserved for Warren, individually, Brinkmeyer does acknowledge that Italy is Warren’s synecdoche for “Europe,” but other complications arise in his treatment. For Warren “Italy”—as many of his poems show—was the conundrum of the Etruscans forward to Mussolini; for Brinkmeyer, Warren’s Italy is just Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Another ping in the running of the thesis is the variety of signifieds for the signifier “totalitarianism.” Since Brinkmeyer deals almost exclusively with white southern writers (Ransom, Tate, Warren, W. J. Cash, William Alexander Percy, Lillian Smith, Lillian Hellman, Thomas Wolfe, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner), the meaning of European fascism for African American writhers in the South (Hurston and Wright) is filtered through homegrown racism. For the white Southern writer, the “totalitarianism” might carry a range of meanings. Percy, for example, might have looked with horror at Nazi Germany, but the oppression he daily faced was patriarchially enforced heterosexuality, and that came from his own father and his own Delta community. [End Page 418] Brinkmeyer alludes to Percy’s sexuality as a factor in his response to world politics (97–98), but strides by quickly. When he turns to Percy’s poems and his memoir, Lanterns on the Levee, Brinkmeyer finds southern traditionalism in class, race, and sexuality to be larger factors than Nazism. In fact, several of the southern writers Brinkmeyer examines found southern traditionalism to be the home-front version of European Fascism: Smith, Cash, McCullers, and Hellman (in Brinkmeyer’s own assessments) were at least as concerned with the Klan, Jim Crow, and the white southern class system as they were with Hitler. The outward focus he claims has a way of bending back inward...

Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and the aesthetic of revelation

With his mastery of modernist technique and his depictions of characters obsessed with the past, Nobel laureate William Faulkner raised the bar for southern fiction writers. But the work of two later authors shows that the aesthetic of memory is not enough: Confederate thunder fades into a comic echo as they turn to an explicitly religious source of meaning. According to John Sykes, the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy provides occasions for divine revelation. He traces their work from its common roots in midcentury southern and Catholic intellectual life to show how the two adopted different theological emphases and rhetorical strategies - O'Connor building to climactic images, Percy striving for dialogue with the reader - as a means of uncovering the sacramental foundation of the created order. Sykes sets O'Connor and Percy against the background of the Southern Renaissance from which they emerged, showing not only how they shared a distinctly Christian notion of art that led them to see fiction as revelatory but also how their methods of revelation took them in different directions. Yet, despite their differences in strategy and emphasis, he argues that the two are united in their conception of the artist as God's sharp-eyed witness, and he connects them with the philosophers and critics, both Christian and non-Christian, who had a meaningful influence on their work. Through sustained readings of key texts - particularly such O'Connor stories as The Artificial Nigger and The Geranium and Percy's novels Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming - Sykes focuses on the intertwined themes of revelation, sacrament, and community. He views their work in relation to the theological difficulties that they were not able to overcome concerning community. For both writers, the question of community is further complicated by the changing nature of the South as the Lost Cause and segregation lose their holds and a new form of prosperity arises. By disclosing how O'Connor and Percy made aesthetic choices based on their Catholicism and their belief that fiction by its very nature is revelatory, Sykes demonstrates that their work cannot be seen as merely a continuation of the historical aesthetic that dominated southern literature for so long. Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation is theoretically sophisticated without being esoteric and is accessible to any reader with a serious interest in these writers, brimming with fresh insights about both that clarify their approaches to art and enrich our understanding of their work.

John Barth’s The Floating Opera and Southern Modernism of the 1950s

Despite hailing and frequently setting his fiction on Eastern Shore of Maryland--a region whose history includes slavery, plantation agriculture, widespread support for Confederate cause during Civil War, and de jure racial segregation into 1960s--John Barth is rarely considered southern writer. His fiction displays little interest in what were once considered orthodox preoccupations of southern renascence, such as, in Cleanth Brooks's words, the pervading sense of community, the sense of religious wholeness, or a sense of tragic dimension of life, all of which were held to exist more robustly in rural societies (217). (1) Nor is Barth much given to railing against industrialization or abstractions of life under finance capitalism. His work does not dwell on racial matters, representing neither worst horrors of southern racism nor quests for freedom and collective redemption that they have provoked. His sensibility is primarily comic, his fiction largely free of tragic and gothic monumentalism, and his public persona that of nice guy who likes to write, wants readers to like his work, and smiles bemusedly when accused of lack of gravitas. On few occasions when critics have considered Barth's possible southernness, they have done so under rubric of for as Martyn Bone observes, It is truth universally acknowledged among Southern literary scholars that 'the South' and 'southern literature' have been characterized by 'sense of place.' (vii). This phrase, evoking both what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls production of presence (xiii--xiv) and dense historical resonance, still serves in quarters as shorthand for southern authenticity, and critics who apply it to Barth ask whether his work possesses it sufficiently, usually answering in negative. Lewis A. Lawson, for instance, in brief entry on Barth in History of Southern Literature, opines that Barth's early work still shows some regard for ability of to particularize an existence, so that hot, dense flattened-out land/sea scape of Maryland's Eastern Shore is not merely employed as background or as reflection of mood, but is factor that circumscribes. ... In time, though, Lawson continues, place simply becomes trifle, like Muzak in dentist's office--an external which bores, but in no other way impinges upon consciousness (517). Even Barth's re-creation of Maryland's colonial history in Sot-Weed Factor (1960) proceeds not a close attention to landmark or artifact but from culture, talk and culminates in (heretical) sense that all values are relative. John M. Bradbury, writing in 1969, goes further and castigates both Barth and Walker Percy for betraying southern literary heritage, presenting modern South, which is no longer cultural entity (321) but tragicomic absurdity (329). Barth, for his part, has provoked such critique through his repeated assertions that social history, politics, and ethics have no claim on his fictive practice. Muse, spare me (at desk, I mean) social-historical responsibility, and in last analysis every other kind as well, except artistic, he wrote in 1965 (Muse 55). (2) Fourteen years later, he would assert simultaneously humanist faith in timelessness and placelessness of great literature and an aesthete's belief in its essential self-reflexivity: The literature that finally matters in any is almost never principally about that culture but rather about the passions of human breast ... possibilities of human language ... [and] almost always also about itself (Historical Fiction 190, 191; Barth's italics). former statement anticipates John Gardner's notorious attack on Barth in On Moral Fiction; latter one invites critique left for its ahistoricality and its naive or irresponsible politics.(3) And both statements stand in contrast to prescriptive conservatism, committed both to artistic moral responsibility and to centrality of place, that informs judgments of Lawson and Bradbury. …

Inheriting the Renaissance: Three Writers of the Post-War South

Inheriting the Renaissance:Three Writers of the Post-War South Douglas Mitchell Madison Jones' Garden of Innocence. Edited by Jan Norby Gretlund. Odense: UP of Southern Denmark, 2005. 207 pp. $34.95 cloth. Shelby Foote and the Art of History: Two Gates to the City. By James Panabaker. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2004. xviii + 238 pp. $32.00 cloth. The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. By Georg Guillemin. College StationTexas A&M UP2004. 170 pp. $29.95 cloth. The generation of writers who came of age after World War II had the unenviable task of following the Southern Renaissance. As Flannery O'Connor famously said of Faulkner, "Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down." Three writers who had to come to terms with inheriting the Renaissance, both in their self-conception and the minds of their readers, are Shelby Foote, Madison Jones, and Cormac McCarthy. For Foote and McCarthy, it was moving beyond Faulkner, and for Jones the Agrarian vision of Andrew Lytle and Donald Davidson. This movement out from under the Renaissance, so to speak, is the subject of three recent books devoted to these writers. Jan Norby Gretlund's volume, the most traditional of the three, treats the most traditional writer. Madison Jones has been sadly neglected by critics, but he is a fine novelist and easily the major heir of the southern [End Page 158] Agrarians. Gretlund provides a solid introduction, laying out Jones' importance as a transitional figure between the Renaissance and contemporary southern literature, and he has included a valuable collection of commentary and criticism from a range of major critics and writers, among them Lewis Lawson, George Garrett, Hans Skei, and Richard Gray. Several themes run through all the essays, as they do in Jones' work, such as the destruction of the traditional order of the family farm, and the ineradicable presence of evil. Further, what the essays all make clear is that Jones, as a second generation Agrarian, possesses a fully developed sense that what destroys the traditional order is latent within that order itself. Each critic has his or her own way of getting at that problem, and the difficulty of any simple notion of return. The two strongest essays are those by Hans Skei on Season of the Strangler and Richard Gray on Herod's Wife. Both of these reveal Jones' technical mastery, with Skei taking on the question of unity of form within the short story sequence and Gray looking at the implications of a shifting narrative form. Both come to grips with one of the strongest traits of Jones' writing: a kind of potent indeterminacy when confronting the mystery of human evil. The most valuable portions of the book, however, are by Jones himself, including his acceptance speech for the T.S. Eliot Award and an interview with Gretlund. On the whole, the collection is a start toward putting some solid criticism of Jones on library shelves to complement what is scattered in the journals. James Panabaker, in Shelby Foote and the Art of History: Two Gates to the City, traces Foote's movement out of the shadow of Faulkner and southern modernism and into his own distinct aesthetic. Faulkner himself said of Foote at the University of Virginia that he "shows promise, if he'll just stop trying to write Faulkner, and will write some Shelby Foote." Panabaker rightly focuses on Foote's attempt to order the chaos unleashed by modernist relativism through aesthetic form. Foote works, Panabaker writes, "by placing his own sense of modernist relativism within clearly demarcated, almost classical, narrative structures—an approach I call his aesthetic of limitations." Panabaker, in his two opening chapters, begins with Foote's heritage and the problem of Faulkner, then moves to his effort to reenvision the South in the mythic landscape of Jordan County. His middle chapter, on the aesthetics of limitation, deals with Foote's creation of an adequate form to treat the vagaries of memory. The final two chapters are largely devoted to Foote's magnum opus, his Civil War narrative. [End Page 159] For Panabaker, Foote's greater distance from the marked cultural shift...

Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936-1961 (review)

Reviewed by: Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961 Laura Quinn Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961. By Gary Richards. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. 256. $44.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). This impressive and useful monograph manages to be both ambitious and compact, both careful and lively. Richards, an associate professor of English at New Orleans University, challenges what he sees as an evasion of homosexuality in critical discourse on southern literature in the era designated the "Southern Renaissance." The book is ambitious in its theoretical grounding in contemporary gay/lesbian and/or queer theory and in its corrective, revisionary claims for its historicized geographical subject. Its compactness is enabled by the author's skill at close reading of texts as well as the incisiveness of his encapsulation of critical genealogies. The book is a lively [End Page 330] read because of its quite distinctive lucidity—with respect to both textual exegesis and theoretical deployments—and because the six authors he has chosen for case study and the sometimes lesser-known works he explores are illuminated and enlivened by his analyses. This study's final signature feature—its "carefulness"—manifests itself in several ways. First, in terminological distinctions between, for instance, same-sex desire and homosexuality and again between what he calls gender transitivity/intransitivity, along with his title phrase, sexual otherness, and the fixedness of homosexual identity, which he wants to question. Additionally, he has not "significantly deployed the term queer" because it "risks sacrificing the centrality of desire and same-sex desire in particular" (2). Second, in a cautionary claim that, while the fiction he chooses for study clearly foregrounds homoeroticism, a reader should not only not "presume an absence in an uninterrogated text, one also should not presume a presence" (4–5). Third, in resisting "homophiliac" readings of southern fiction, as "this study works against the erection of a univocal southern gay/lesbian canon," seeking to see instead that "these six writers' representations of same-sex desire are contradictory and disruptive of critical continuities" (6). The six Southern Renaissance writers in Richards's anticanon are Truman Capote, William Goyen, Richard Wright, Lillian Smith, Harper Lee, and Carson McCullers. Richards argues that each exemplifies the centrality of same-sex desire in southern mid-twentieth-century fiction, that these representations of desire get "quarantined" in critical discourse, and yet that each writer does quite distinct and (largely) unprecedented fictional things with this desire. His first chapter, "Freaks with a Voice," tracks the critical foundations of Southern Renaissance literary discourse in order to establish and explain its propensity to quarantine its "freaks." By this compelling account, the Southern Renaissance emerges as a defensive move against charges of cultural aridity in the twentieth-century South, notably exemplified by H. L. Mencken's disparaging 1917 essay, "The Sahara of the Bozart" (8). The archresponders to this charge were the members of the Nashville Agrarian group, composed of "former Fugitives and eventual New Critics," including Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, and other self-nominated gatekeepers of this Renaissance (9). The Agrarian agenda was conservative, family values oriented, and fixed on minimizing "the presence of same-sex desire (and other disruptive elements of otherness and multiplicity) in twentieth-century southern literature" (18). Richards argues that the agenda-laden Agrarian aesthetic was paradoxically compatible with the supposedly apolitical formalism of New Criticism and that this fusion had critical staying power in the last half of the twentieth century. He argues further that, when this paradigm began to shift, it tended to compensate for decades of neglect or reductive treatment of race and racism by "belaboring these issues at the minimization or exclusion of others," effectively "quarantining" sexual otherness yet again (21). That [End Page 331] is, southern critics did this; nonsouthern critics, by contrast, emphasized sexual otherness in southern texts as depravity—most memorably, Leslie Fiedler in his identifications of the gothic in Faulkner and his famous claim that "post–World War II American fiction can be roughly divided into 'the Jewish-heterosexual wing' and 'the Southern homosexual'" (quoted on 27). Richards sees this nonsouthern critical "quarantining...

The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism: Gender and Agrarianism in Glasgow's Barren Ground

The subject of regionalism has once again become a central preoccupation of cultural criticism. What is noteworthy about this resurgence of critical interest in regionalism is its feminist turn. In late 1980s, feminist theorists began to recover importance of a regionalist framework to U.S. women's writing. Collections of literary and historical essays, such as Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women's Regional Writing (1997), The Female Tradition in Southern Literature 0993), and Writing Range: Race, Class and Culture in Women's West (1991) began to appear in earnest in 1990s. In this essay, I build on this work, but I am also interested in a specific analysis of how regionalism, specifically Agrarianism, formulates relation between private and public as gendered, and how Ellen Glasgow reveals in Barren Ground (1925) that marginalization of female labor and reproduction is constitutive of this regional paradigm. The study of South as a cultural region has had a long institutional history in United States, but feminist literary critics working in field of culture have challenged traditional methods of reading Southern Renaissance of interwar years. At same time, cultural critics have rediscovered interdisciplinary and cross-regional contexts of that renaissance. Yet it becomes exasperatingly clear that these two critical gestures--the one an opening up of literary to a broader cultural context, and, second, a reconsideration of, as Anne Goodwyn Jones terms it, the work of in a regionalist framework--do not often overlap. The work of women writers, and importance of gender, to any formulation of cultural claims of regionalism is often suppressed, excluded, or marginalized when critics approach subject using interdisciplinary methodologies of modernist, U.S., or cultural studies. Robert Dorman's recent contribution to American studies is a good example. In Revolt of Provinces, Dorman considers writing of regional sociologists, writers, historians, and documentarians as part of general regionalist movement of 20s and 30s. Dorman's study is replete with details on ideological and aesthetic commitments of regionalism. But, while Dorman discusses western writing of Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Mari Sandoz, as well as activities of Mabel Dodge Luhan and early female historians, he does not discuss how early twentieth-century feminism may have influenced regionalist aesthetics or ideologies nor role that gender politics may have played in some of underlying assumptions of movement and its outcome. Another example of marginalization of women writers and work of gender in studies of interwar regionalism can be found in Richard King's A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of American South 1930-1955. Traditionally, work of Fugitives and Agrarians, along with Faulkner's writing, has dominated discussions of Southern Renaissance. However, King makes significant point that renaissance was a movement that stretched across disciplines, and thus, he includes in his study historians, sociologists, and journalists, as well as well-known literary figures. King's framework for understanding is what he calls southern family romance, a rebellion against generation of fathers preceding authors (thus interest in grandfather in many novels); from this rebellion emerges a historical consciousness fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity about relation between past and present (7). In defending his selection of texts, King states, Black writers are not taken up because for them Southern family was hardly problematic.... Their great theme was attempt (literally) to escape white South which had historically oppressed their people. …

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Ellen Cronan Rose This issue of jml introduces two new features: each article is followed by a 100–150 word abstract and a list of key words. Our publisher asked us to include these features to make the journal more searchable online. The print version of jml becomes an electronic version that many university and public libraries make available to users via electronic databases such as Project Muse. Since 90 percent of jml's subscriptions are institutional, it seems safe to reckon that more than three-quarters of our readers read the journal on a computer screen. What next? iPod downloads? Well, maybe something like that. There's a company called E-ink in Cambridge, Massachusetts that has developed a prototype electronic gadget that looks and feels like a newspaper (paper, ink, and all). But because it can be wirelessly attached to a subscription source (e.g., The New York Times or jml), it automatically updates itself on demand (daily for the Times, quarterly for jml).1 Oh brave new world, that has such "books" in't. We begin this issue with a cluster of three essays that interrogate narrative discourse and textual production. If anyone could theorize the implications for literature and literary scholarship of E-ink, it might well be Tony Jackson, whose lead article, "The De-Composition of Writing in A Passage to India," asserts that the scholarship on writing as a material technology has "intriguing implications" for the study of literary texts. The assertion is amply supported by Jackson's provocative reading of E. M. Forster's canonical modernist novel. Jackson concedes that he did not attempt to historicize the theoretical issues and conflicts he saw at play in A Passage to India. Brian Rourke's study of Under the Volcano, "Malcolm Lowry's Memory Machine: An Eclectic Systemë," proceeds from a materialist understanding of textual production similar to Jackson's. Unlike Jackson, however, Rourke is keenly attentive to the way in which the historical contexts which inform Lowry's novel affected his technical problems in producing it. Illustrative of Tony Jackson's dictum that "one of the key qualities of written texts is their materiality" is Doris Lessing's palimpsestic The [End Page iv] Golden Notebook, with its black, red, yellow, and blue notebooks, which we are invited to read by Anna Wulf, protagonist of the frame novel "Free Women." That novel turns out to have been written by (the same?) Anna Wulf, who may or may not be the author of The Golden Notebook. These mysteries are boldly confronted by Tonya Krouse, whose project is precisely to distinguish Anna the fictionalized character from the Anna whose writing occupies, like Doris Lessing's, a multiplicity of twentieth-century literary movements. When pondering whether The Golden Notebook is a "modernist," "postmodernist," or "feminist" text, one might do well to remember Lessing's oft-quoted observation that "it isn't either or at all, it's and, and, and, and, and, and" (Briefing 165). The next cluster of three essays is also concerned—on a spectrum ranging from the cerebral and ratiocinative to the downright gory—with production. The unifying link is maternity. In "Kristevan Themes in Virginia Woolf's The Waves," Chloë Taylor deploys Julia Kristeva's theorization of the relationship to the mother and to language as a way to explicate the complex characterization and symbolism of Woolf's arguably most difficult if also most poetic and affecting novel. For Andrea Jenkins, the theory articulated by Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" is anticipated by the unjustly neglected Southern Renaissance writer Evelyn Scott. Scott's 1921 novel The Narrow House and 1923 memoir Escapade record the physicality and abjection of the maternal body that Kristeva's "herethics" was conceived to remedy. The ultimate maternal abjection is abortion, and jml may be the first literary journal to publish an article on the modernist and post-war novelists who dared to bring it to their readers' attention. Sally Minogue and Andrew Palmer resurrect these pioneering efforts by Aldous Huxley, Jean Rhys, Nell Dunn, and Alan Sillitoe, in a brilliant if discomfiting essay that situates their readings in a context provided by Bakhtin's theory of the...

Cavaliers and Crackers, Tara and Tobacco Road: The Myth of a Two-Class White South

In Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, eminent southernist Y(stet)Fred Hobson argues that since the early 19th century, southern discourse has been dominated by a desire to explain the South to a nation critical of its practices. This “rage to explain” was particularly apparent in the era known as the Southern Renaissance — the period roughly between World War I and World War II that saw a flowering of southern letters and intellectual life. During this period, southern poets, novelists, essayists, historians, and sociologists participated in a comprehensive enactment of the southern “rage to explain” the South, both to itself and to the rest of the world. Within this outbreak of explanation, a significant pattern emerges: a pattern of resistance to what I shall call the myth of a two-class white South.Throughout American history, northerners and southerners alike have colluded to create the impression that the antebellum white South consisted of only two classes: aristocratic planters on one extreme and debased poor whites on the other. This impression was initiated in the 18th century, when William Byrd's histories of the dividing line introduced the image of the poor white in the form of the laughable “Lubberlander.” The stereotype of the comic and/or degraded poor white can be traced from Byrd through George Washington Harris's tales of Sut Lovingood (1867) to William Alexander Percy's diatribes against poor whites in Lantern on the Levee (1941) and William Faulkner's unflattering portrayal of the Snopeses (1940–59). Meanwhile, the images of the courteous, kindly planter and of the plantation as pastoral idyll can be traced from John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) through the postbellum plantation fiction of Thomas Nelson Page to Stark Young's Civil War romance, So Red the Rose (1934).

Literary Studies: The Southern United States, 2005

“The Greatest Mistake Made in Judging Southern Literature, Even by its Friends, is That We are Apt to Speak of it By Itself as if it were a thing apart and a country apart.” John Bell Henneman made this assessment a century ago, in 1903 (347). Fifty-one years later, Jay B. Hubbell observed, “The literature of the South … cannot be understood and appraised if one neglects its many and complicated relations with the literature of the rest of the nation” ('x“). Not long after Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs publishedThe Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South(1953), a collection of essays by distinguished United States scholars in and beyond the South, the study of southern literature, conceived in the spirit of Henneman and Hubbell, became an academic specialty, with its centers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (where Rubin taught); at Vanderbilt University (the home of Thomas Daniel Young, the New Critics, and, a generation earlier, the Agrarians); and at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (where Lewis P. Simpson edited theSouthern Review).There were outriders: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren infiltrated Yale. They made such an impression that, today, when people from the Northeast are asked to define southern United States literature, they are likely to channel Brooks in his emphasis on the importance of family, kinship, community, history, and memory in the imagined South. None of this is meant to imply that the literature of the southern United States was not studied before the mid-fifties; it was. Its departures from the broader national tradition were noted, but it did not constitute an academic specialty as it does today. The publication ofThe Southern Renascenceand subsequent work by Rubin, Hubbell, Brooks and Warren, C. Hugh Holman, and many others not only institutionalized southern literature as a specialization in the United States academy but also defined the field in terms of the South's relations with the rest of the nation.

Saving Southern History in Caroline Gordon's Penhally

In the half-century following the Civil War, affluent white southern women realized that they had a view of gender conventions which no longer merged seamlessly with that of white southern men. As Anne Goodwyn Jones notes, this meant that, [c]aught between white supremacy and inferiority, for the first time their to [their] race might well conflict with [their] loyalties to [their] sex (24). Postbellum upper-middle and upper-class white southern women gradually became aware, on an unprecedented scale, not only of their as female in terms closer to those employed by bourgeois New Women of the North, but also that they confronted a cultural image of themselves that served someone else's needs (Jones 25) rather than their own. And the spirit of innovation and challenge to old mores particular to the early twentieth century helped clear the path for many women to explore that feminine image in more critical terms than they had ever been able to do before. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw argues that a significant element of the historical consciousness which helps characterize the writers of the Southern Renaissance is the to understand and to terms with the dominating image of the (74). For upper-middle and upper-class white southern women writers in particular, the image of the southern lady was an entity which had to be examined in order for each of them to be able to situate herself as a person in history, ... who has been shaped by images and myths she only partly apprehends and controls, and, at last, who in her turn will be ... a shaper of myths to come (Prenshaw 83). Like their male contemporaries, many white southern women writers sought both a personal and a cultural identity in the stuff of southern history, and although some of them fundamentally were in sympathy with Agrarian assumptions, many times they perceived the Civil War, the loss of the Old Order, and the fallout of southern defeat somewhat differently in both cultural and personal terms. The material history they examined, the imaginative perspective from which they viewed it, and the literary and cultural conclusions they drew often differed radically from what has to be perceived as the quintessential Southern Renaissance confrontation between old and new. At the core of this difference in approach lay a fundamental breach between how white men and women perceived the downfall of that culture in the first place: male writers and critics often have tended to see the advent of the southern tragedy in a single, abrupt moment of apocalypse that changed their region forever and produced an inertia that made them backward-looking and loyally adherent to the old ways. In contrast, women writers more often have perceived southern history as an unfocused, unproductive clinging to a social order continually crumbling away, which prevented anyone from prospering--intellectually, spiritually, and often materially. For many white southern women writers, the conflict between old and new has been double-edged. The Civil War set in motion a drawn out, often uncomfortable process of remaking personal as well as regional identity, which demanded setting aside the old assumptions and treading on unfamiliar territory; but in addition-what might be the real crux of the tragedy for white women--this meant a continual fight against masculine cultural nostalgia if women and, ultimately, the South were to forge a viable new sense of self. While affluent white women, too, regretted the loss of their familiar ways of life, finally they could afford to be more forward-looking and optimistic about putting aside the vestiges of the old order than could the men, who felt themselves to have had much more at stake in the plantation system and hence much more to lose with its final demise. Caroline Gordon embraced the opportunity offered by modernism to grapple with remaking white southern feminine identity in the context of values and beliefs inherited from the Old South, along the way confronting the blockade to that effort thrown up by intense masculine nostalgia for the Old Order. …

Eudora Welty's Personal Epic: Autobiography, Art, and Classical Myth

The importance of tale, legend, and myth, especially many aspects of classical myth, to the creation and understanding of fiction by Eudora Welty has been long recognized and widely accepted. Many of her works have been read in mythical terms, in particular her short fiction cycle The Golden Apples (1949); yet only a few critical efforts have extended the perspectives of myth to her entire canon, and even fewer have considered Classicism as central to her overall accomplishments. (1) Welty's work is vital to the contemporary transformation of the twentieth-century American and southern literary pantheon, so earlier considerations of her classical connections focus on feminine, if not feminist, retellings of ancient narratives. Although recent readings of Welty's fiction by way of female myths reveal much of its subtle beauty and cultural complexity, more may be discovered by re-reading her canon within the full contexts of the Classicism informed the origins, accomplishments, and traditions of the Southern Renaissance. (2) Certainly, feminist readers are right to contrast Welty's use of the Classics with of her more traditional male role models such as William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren as well as with their modernist mentors such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. The classical intertextualities form her fictions are employed more on the model of female modernists such as Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen, or, closer to home, Katherine Anne Porter and Caroline Gordon. Yet Welty's fictional canon might be read as her Modernist epic of the self, much in the terms Alan Williamson applied to Allen Tate's poetic oeuvre by defining this contemporary variant of the epic tradition as that particularly modern form which views historical material entirely through the glass of private sensibility, fragmenting it as a series of lyrics rather than presenting it as a whole, as narrative (714). Lyrical narratives rather than poetic lyrics are the individual aspects of her personal vision, while her canon is united in a quest for fulfillment as a woman and as an artist. These two aspects of Welty's art share much with male and female precursors alike in her recreation of American, southern, and Mississippi by autobiographical, artistic, and classical means. Although Eudora Welty did not have the rigorous classical training of academic colleagues learned in Greek and Latin in the Southern Renaissance, such as Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, her formal and informal education in the Classics was still substantial. Her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings (1984), recalls her immersion in mythical material almost from the time she began to read; certainly it dated from the sixth or seventh birthday when doting parents presented her with Every Child's Story Book, a compilation of fairy tales ... myths and legends ... [and] history (One Writer's Beginnings 8). English lessons at Jefferson Davis School and later French and Latin classes at Jackson Central High School confirmed the young Eudora's love for words and stories. Her high school Latin was strong enough to excuse her from assignments in order to tutor her less proficient classmates (Waldron II)., The Classics were still the center of college preparation in the early 1920s, and Central High's honoraries were organized around classical themes; for example, the club book in Welty's senior year was The Aeneid (Waldron 12). English, French, and Latin were once more her favorite classes at nearby Mississippi State College for Women, where Welty studied for two years before transferring to complete a degree in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1929 with a creative thesis, now lost (Waldron 41). Evidently, the writer returned often to her favorite books in all three literatures and languages, or in translations, to mark transitions in her career (Waldron 183). For example, after completing The Golden Apples, her book most fully structured by classical allusion, Welty reread Homer's Odyssey in preparation for her first trip to Europe in 1949 by way of Italy and the Mediterranean (Marrs 145). …

Robert Penn Warren's circus aesthetic and the Southern Renaissance

The popularity of the circus in the United States reached its zenith in the early 1900s; as the century progressed, the circus gradually came to reflect traditional American values. Observing the growing conservatism of the circus during this period, Robert Penn Warren and other authors of the Southern Renaissance found it complemented their representations of both the mythic Old South and the cultural stagnation resulting from allegiance to it, especially in light of social and moral imperatives to adapt to the New South. In this book, Patricia L. Bradley analyzes the extent to which Warren s 1947 novella The Circus in the Attic and its use of the circus trope establishes a critical matrix for interpreting his fiction, poetry, essays, and literary criticism. She then goes on to examine the ways in which authors such as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Katherine Anne Porter, Caroline Gordon, Eudora Welty, and Ralph Ellison also use the metaphor alternately to mourn and to celebrate changes in both the tenor of the South and the vehicle of the carnival. Even contemporary heirs to the Southern Renaissance, such as Toni Morrison, use the circus trope to similar effect. Robert Penn Warren s Circus Aesthetic and the Southern Renaissance aligns Warren s work with that of other authors of the Southern Renaissance and examines intertextuality among them. Further, it establishes The Circus in the Attic a short, teachable Warren piece as central to his canon. Finally, this book adroitly reveals the expressive role of the circus in southern history and culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Patricia L. Bradley is assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Her articles have appeared in the Companion to Southern Literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Early American Literature, and other publications. A thorough, thoughtful, well-informed, and beautifully written examination of the circus theme in Robert Penn Warren s fiction and in the fiction of the Southern Renaissance generally. John Burt, Brandeis University

New Directions in Southern Women's Literary Historiography

Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks foUow their 1995 anthology, Southern Women's Writing: Colonial to Contemporary, with Uterary history. Much more than valuable compendium of information on southern women writ ers from EUza Lucas Pinckney (writing in the eighteenth century) to Kaye Gibbons, The History oj Southern Women's Literature offers its readers new ways to think about southern Uterary history, chaUenging conventional periodiza tion, movements, and themes that have come to be generaUy accepted as defining the field. The local color movement of the late nineteenth century, for example, achieves level of significance in the hands of these essayists that it does not have in traditional histories centered on the work of white male writers. And Perry and Weaks take Carol S. Manning up on the chaUenge she makes to conventional periodization in The Female Tradition in Southern Lit erature (1993) by estabUshing the beginning of the Southern Renaissance in 1900, move that recovers number of women writers who have been mar ginaUzed by conventional male-centered Uterary histories in which the South ern Renaissance begins after World War I. Later in the volume Linda T?te identifies a second southern renaissance ... far more robust and diverse than

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.

Women Writers, the "Southern Front," and the Dialectical Imagination

for me, the intellectual present in which I came of age, was the peak and crest of the Southern Literary Renaissance. No Southern youth of any sensitivity could help being excited by the explosion of creativity taking place during the early 1930s--in fiction, in poetry, in drama. Nor could I help seeing that the novelists, poets, and playwrights were in the main writing about the same South historians were writing about and making the whole world of letters at home and abroad read what they wrote and ring with their praise. With this awareness and the expectations it aroused, I arrived as a young apprentice at the doors of the history guild for training--and what a striking contrast, what a letdown, what a falling off! No renaissance here, no surge of innovation and creativity, no rebirth of energy, no compelling new vision. This was a craft devoted primarily at the time, or so it seemed to me, to summing up, confirming, illustrating, and consolidating the received wisdom, the regional consensus that prevailed uniquely in the South of the 1930s and--though I could not then have known it--was to continue through the 1940s. That consensus proclaimed the enduring and fundamentally unbroken unity, solidarity, and continuity of Southern history. C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back (1986) It is our inward journey that leads us through time--forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling.... As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (1984) IN THE FALL OF 1924, AS THE SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE GATHERED FORCE, Grace Lumpkin wrenched herself out of South Carolina with a plan. She had dreamed of writing during peaceful Sunday afternoons spent listening to her mother read aloud. As a Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) emissary in France during World War I, she had sent home dispatches from the front. Now, like so many southerners before her, she was convinced that only New York could give her the cultural wherewithal (the skills, the self-confidence, the fund of experience) for a project of self-invention. She wanted to become a writer. She also wanted romance and politics, preferably packaged together. (1) Within weeks of arriving in the city, Lumpkin found a job at the World Tomorrow, one of the best little magazines in New York. Two years later she broke into print, with a prescient intervention in the Harlem Renaissance debates. In The Artist in a Hostile Environment, co-authored with her roommate Esther Shemitz, Grace argued that black writers should not be limited to social protest, but neither should they be condemned for combating the insults and humiliations that assailed them at every turn. (2) Together, Grace and Esther did what they recommended: they used their art to join the political fray. Walking the picket line at the Passaic, New Jersey, strike of 1926-27, they found themselves beaten back toward a soup kitchen, screamed at by a sheriff, and dodging great blue arms swinging clubs against human, quivering flesh. Lumpkin captured the experience in a brief but vivid snapshot, published in the New Masses along with articles by some of the country's leading literary lights. (3) In 1927 she went to jail during the demonstrations in behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti and wrote her first published work of fiction, taking as her subject not this cause celebre but a simultaneous disaster, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. White Man--A Story is a tale of race and sex in which, like an extraordinary number of such characters in southern women's interwar novels, a black woman disappears into the landscape without proper burial; her body becomes part of a perverse political economy--a melancholic detritus in a traumatized land. (4) With this story, Grace Lumpkin turned decisively toward home, taking up a subject to which she would often return: the lives of southern women who were shaped and damaged by the sexual economies in which they circulated as well as by the terms of their labor. …

Strange and lurid bloom: a study of the fiction of Caroline Gordon

Caroline Gordon, regarded as a minor figure of the Southern Renaissance, was enviviosned as a writer, sometimes as a mother, but most often as a wife to Allen Tate and as a hostess and novelist who entertained and sometimes mentored artists visiting their home in Tennessee. This critical interpretation assesses Caroline Gordon's early struggles to gain voice and respect as a writer, her tendency to explore themes of sexual and racial tension, and the strange and lurid bloom of Gordon's genius.

Kate Chopin and Anna Julia Cooper: Critiquing Kentucky and the South

Kate Chopin has been difficult for scholars to fix as a southern writer, beyond an earlier view of her as an exceptional local colorist whose work—especially her second novel The Awakening—looked forward to the modernist literature produced by many southern writers in the twentieth century. Having stopped writing as the twentieth century was dawning, she could not qualify as a Southern Renascence writer, at least according to the paradigm directing southern literary studies that held sway into the 1980s. And she seemed not wholly to identify herself in her life or through her work as a southerner, as Anne Goodwyn Jones notes in her 1981 study, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South. Yet, as Jones also observes, "the symbols [Chopin] chose to invest her subject with imaginative power come from her Southern experience" (149). Since Jones' book was published, a number of scholars have also identified Chopin as being both a part of and apart from the South—with the apartness indicating not the kind of ambivalence about region born of an engagement with southern concerns so often associated with (white male) Renascence writers, but rather indicating just plain disengagement with the South and its concerns. Noteworthy among the critics who have seen Chopin in this light is Helen Taylor, who in 1989 argued that Chopin used southern themes and characters to enter a predominantly European discourse about "sexuality, bourgeois marriage, [End Page 123] and woman's role" (157). Yet, according to Taylor, Chopin took "a thoroughly orthodox [white] southern line on race" (155), rendering The Awakening, her fictional masterpiece, "a feminist regionalist work that . . . lapses into unexamined racism" (201).

Dixie Limited: railroads, culture, and the southern renaissance

For the people of the South, railroads were both an economic boon and a metaphor for the process of southern industrialization. By reconsidering the role of railroads in southern culture and their representation in the literature of the South, Joseph Millichap has transformed his long-time personal and professional interest in railroads and southern writers into a new analysis of the Southern Renaissance. Millichap suggests the portrayal of railroads in the literature of the day gives a more accurate understanding of the nature of the South's cultural flowering in the twentieth century. Featuring important texts from such celebrated writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, and others, Dixie Limited addresses the depiction of the railroads in southern literature and their impact on southern culture.