Southern literature
Novel in the SOUTH OF AMERICA
LEVEL 8
Southern literature (sometimes called the literature of the American
South) is defined as American literature about the Southern United
States or by writers from this region. Characteristics of Southern
literature include a focus on a common Southern history, the significance
of family, a sense of community and one’s role within it, a sense of
justice, the region's dominant religion (Christianity — see Protestantism)
and the burdens/rewards religion often brings, issues of racial tension,
land and the promise it brings, a sense of social class and place, and the
use of the Southern dialect.
In its simplest form, Southern literature consists of writing about
the American South—the South being defined, for historical as well as
geographical
reasons,
as
the
states
of
South
Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, North
Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma,
Kentucky, West Virginia and Arkansas.[4] Pre-Civil War definitions of the
South often included Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware as well.
In addition to the geographical component of Southern literature,
certain themes have appeared because of the similar histories of the
Southern states in regard to slavery, the American Civil War,
and Reconstruction. The conservative culture in the South has also
produced a strong focus within Southern literature on the significance of
family, religion, community in one's personal and social life, the use of
the Southern dialect, and a strong sense of "place." The South's troubled
history with racial issues also continually appears in its literature.
Early and antebellum( prewar) literature
After American independence, in the early 19th century, the expansion
of cotton planting and slavery began to distinguish Southern society and
culture more clearly from the rest of the young republic. During
this antebellum period, South Carolina, and particularly the city of
Charleston, rivaled and perhaps surpassed Virginia as a literary
community. Writing in Charleston, the lawyer and essayist Hugh Swinton
Legare, the poets Paul Hamilton Hayne and Henry Timrod, and the
novelist William Gilmore Simms composed some of the most important
works in antebellum Southern literature.
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Simms was a particularly significant figure, perhaps the most
prominent Southern author before the American Civil War. His novels of
frontier life and the American Revolution celebrated the history of South
Carolina. Like James Fenimore Cooper, Simms was strongly influenced
by Walter Scott, and his works bore the imprint of Scott's heroic
romanticism. In The Yemassee, The Kinsmen, and the anti-Uncle Tom's
Cabin novel The Sword and the Distaff, Simms presented idealized
portraits of slavery and Southern life. While popular and well regarded in
South Carolina—and highly praised by such critics as Edgar Allan Poe—
Simms never gained a large national audience.
Some critics regard Poe himself as a Southern author—he was raised
in Richmond, attended the University of Virginia, and edited the Southern
Literary Messenger from 1835 to 1837. Yet in his poetry and fiction Poe
rarely took up distinctively Southern themes or subjects; his status as a
"Southern" writer remains ambiguous.
In the Chesapeake region, meanwhile, antebellum authors of enduring
interest include John Pendleton Kennedy, whose novel Swallow
Barn offered a colorful sketch of Virginia plantation life; and Nathaniel
Beverley Tucker, whose 1836 work The Partisan Leader foretold the
secession of the Southern states, and imagined a guerrilla war in Virginia
between federal and secessionist armies.
Not all noteworthy Southern authors during this period were
white. Frederick Douglass's Narrative is perhaps the most famous firstperson account of black slavery in the antebellum South. Harriet Jacobs,
meanwhile, recounted her experiences in bondage in North Carolina
in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. And another Southern-born exslave, William Wells Brown, wrote Clotel; or, The President's
Daughter—widely believed to be the first novel ever published by
an African-American. The book depicts the life of its title character, a
daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his black mistress, and her struggles
under slavery.
The "Lost Cause" years
In the second half of the 19th century, the South lost the Civil War and
suffered through what many white southerners considered a harsh
occupation (called Reconstruction). In place of the anti-Tom literature
came poetry and novels about the "Lost Cause of the Confederacy." This
nostalgic literature began to appear almost immediately after the war
ended; The Conquered Banner was published on June 24, 1865. These
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writers idealized the defeated South and its lost culture. Prominent writers
with this point of view included poets Henry Timrod, Daniel B. Lucas,
and Abram Joseph Ryan and fiction writer Thomas Nelson Page. Others,
like African-American writer Charles W. Chesnutt, dismissed this
nostalgia by pointing out the racism and exploitation of blacks that
happened during this time period in the South.
In 1884, Mark Twain published what is arguably the most influential
southern novel of the 19th century, The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn. Ernest Hemingway said of the novel, "All modern American
literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry
Finn." This statement applies even more to southern literature because of
the novel's frank dealings with issues such as race and violence.
Violence and the Novel
Fiction written in the United States before and after the conflict now
referred to as the Civil War presents different accounts of violence. In
particular, early nineteenth-century fiction often refers in laudatory terms
to wars such as the American Revolution, the Mexican– American War,
Indian warfare, and clashes at the borderlands. Seldom does it reveal the
terror and randomness of such violence, though the depiction of “border
ruffians” in such novels as Cooper’s The Spy (1821) suggests an anxiety
about its purposelessness. Later in the century, realist and naturalist
fiction describes the failure of reconstruction and the tactics associated
with lynching (in novels such as Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces
[1900]). The very foregrounding of the color red in novels such as The
Scarlet Letter and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
emphasizes the color of blood as the color of shame and belonging at
once. These novels, long taken as markers of adolescent passages within
the United States, as well as staples of the literature classroom, produce
an uncertain value through allusions to blood.
Novels frequently use killing to motivate movement of characters and
plot and mobilize identities through staving off interracial sex and indeed
any chance of reproduction. Such tactics appear in almost all of James
Fenimore Cooper’s novels
Although the Civil War continues to serve as a momentous dividing line
between the understood antebellum and postbellum novels, it scarcely
ever appears as a subject in the postbellum world of fiction. Before the
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war, troops declared themselves to be inspired by Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s bestselling Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). During the war, northern
troops sang “John Brown’s Body” and “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory”
to the same tune. Southern troops read Augusta Evans’s Macaria (1863),
which was dedicated to the “Glorious Cause” (and secretly read in the
north). A postwar exception to the great silence in fiction about the war
experience is John De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from
Secession to Loyalty (1867). This novel 7 Introduction to the American
Novelseems to have been intended as a conversion narrative for the
politics of the United States at large and contains disturbingly vivid
battleground scenes from an author who had, in fact, experienced the
southern front. In developing his own historical fiction as well as writing
about its purpose, De Forest was said to have issued the call for the great
American novel and is credited as the first to use the term.
The major novel associated with the Civil War had to wait a generation.
Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by a young author
who listened to tales of veterans rather than fighting himself, formulated
for the warriors who survived an account of fear and cowardice as well as
heroism that has seldom been equaled.
The Southern Renaissance
In the 1920s and 1930s, a renaissance in Southern literature began with
the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Katherine Anne
Porter, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn
Warren, and Tennessee Williams, among others. Because of the distance
the Southern Renaissance authors had from the American Civil War and
slavery, they were more objective in their writings about the South.
Southern writers tended to focus on historical romances about the "Lost
Cause" of the Confederate States of America. This writing glorified the
heroism of the Confederate army and civilian population during the Civil
War and the supposedly "idyllic culture" that existed in
the Antebellum South.
During
the
1920s,
Southern
poetry
thrived
under
the Vanderbilt "Fugitives". In nonfiction, H.L. Mencken's popularity
increased nationwide as he shocked and astounded readers with his satiric
writing highlighting the inability of the South to produce anything of
cultural value. In reaction to Mencken's essay, "The Sahara of the
Bozart," the Southern Agrarians (also based mostly around Vanderbilt)
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called for a return to the South's agrarian past and bemoaned the rise of
Southern industrialism and urbanization. They noted that creativity and
industrialism were not compatible and desired the return to a lifestyle that
would afford the Southerner leisure (a quality the Agrarians most felt
conducive to creativity). Writers like Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1949, also brought new techniques such as stream of
consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their writings. For
instance, his novel As I Lay Dying is told by changing narrators ranging
from the deceased Addie to her young son.
The late 1930s also saw the publication of one of the best-known
Southern novels, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. The novel,
published in 1936, quickly became a bestseller. It won the 1937 Pulitzer
Prize, and in 1939 an equally famous movie of the novel premiered.
Southern literature became popular across genres; children's books like
Ezekiel, published in 1937 by writer/illustrators like Elvira Garner, drew
audiences outside the South.
Breaking from the motif of romance about the confederacy, literature in
the American South underwent a revival in the 1920s and '30s.

Authors of the Southern Renaissance addressed three major themes: the
burden of history related to slavery and loss, conservative southern
culture, and the region's association with racial issues.


William Faulkner is regarded as the Southern Renaissance's most
influential and famous writer.




The Fugitives, a group of poets and critics based in Nashville following
World War I, is often referred to as the source of the Southern
Renaissance.
p
Opposition to industrialization in the South following World War I was a
popular theme among Southern Renaissance writers, who became known
as Southern Agrarians.
The Southern Renaissance changed this by addressing
three major themes in their works. The first was the burden of history in a
place where many people still remembered slavery, Reconstruction, and a
devastating military defeat. The second theme was the South's
conservative culture, specifically addressing how an individual could
exist without losing a sense of identity in a region where family, religion,
and community were more highly valued than one's personal and social
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life. The final theme that the renaissance writers approached was the
South's troubled history in regards to racial issues.
Because of these writers' distance from the Civil War and slavery,
they were able to bring more objectivity to writings about the South.
They also brought new modernistic techniques such as stream-ofconsciousness and complex narrative techniques to their works. Among
the writers of the Southern Renaissance, William Faulkner is arguably the
most influential and famous, having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1949.
In the 1920s, the satirist H.L. Mencken led the attack on the genteel
tradition in American literature, ridiculing the provincialism of American
intellectual life . In his 1920 essay "The Sahara of the Bozart" (a pun on a
Southern pronunciation of 'beaux-arts') he singled out the South as the
most provincial and intellectually barren region of the U.S., claiming that
since the Civil War, intellectual and cultural life there had gone into
terminal decline. This created a storm of protest from within conservative
circles in the South. However, many emerging Southern writers who were
already highly critical of contemporary life in the South were emboldened
by Mencken's essay. In response to the attacks of Mencken and his
imitators, Southern writers were provoked to a reassertion of Southern
uniqueness and a deeper exploration of the theme of Southern identity.
The start of the Southern Renaissance is often traced back to the
activities of "The Fugitives," a group of poets and critics who were based
at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, just after the first World
War. The group included John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen
Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and others. Together they created the
magazine The Fugitive (1922–1925), so named because the editors
announced that they fled "from nothing faster than from the high-caste
Brahmins of the Old South. "
The emergence of the Southern Renaissance as a literary and
cultural movement has also been seen as a consequence of the opening up
of the predominantly rural South to outside influences due to the
industrial expansion that took place in the region during and after the first
World War. Southern opposition to industrialization was expressed in the
famous essay collection I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian
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Tradition (1930), written by authors and critics from the Southern
Renaissance who came to be known as Southern Agrarians.
Many Southern writers of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s were inspired by the
writers of the Southern Renaissance, including Reynolds Price, James
Dickey, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Carson
McCullers, and Harper Lee (whose novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1961), along with many others. Before the
1970s, African-American authors from the South were not considered
part of Southern literature by the white and mostly male authors and
critics who considered themselves the main creators and guardians of the
Southern literary tradition.
Post World War II Southern literature
Southern literature following the Second World War grew thematically as
it embraced the social and cultural changes in the South resulting from
the American Civil Rights Movement. In addition, more female
and African-American writers began to be accepted as part of Southern
literature, including African Americans such as Zora Neale
Hurstonand Sterling Allen Brown, along with women such as Eudora
Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Ellen Glasgow, Carson McCullers, Katherine
Anne Porter, and Shirley Ann Grau, among many others.
Examples of Southern novels:
The American South has long been seen as the focus of the country’s
Civil Rights Movement, carrying with it the stigma of poverty, racism,
and anti-intellectualism. Yet the region has also produced a
disproportionate number of intellectuals, poets, and writers, possibly
because of the complicated and layered identities each Southerner holds
within him- or herself. The South has begotten some of our nation’s most
important authors, including prize winners like William Styron, Eudora
Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee, and that titan of
American letters, William Faulkner. These 11 novels are a reminder that
the South cannot be defined solely by its failings; it is also responsible for
shaping the minds of countless thinkers who offered to American
literature essential insights about not only their region but the world at
large
1- William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom
Sure, alphabetically, Absalom, Absalom! is first on this list. But,
coincidentally, it is also the greatest Southern novel ever written. A
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crowing achievement of William Faulkner’s experimentation in
narratives and storytelling, it encapsulates all that defines the post-war
(that’s the Civil War, you guys) Southern mentality, perfectly summed up
in the book’s final line, revealing Quentin Compson’s true feelings about
the homeland with which he has such a complicated relationship: “I don’t
hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I
don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”
2- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Faulkner’s tour de force follows a poor family struggling together to
carry their matriarch’s dead body to be buried with her kin. In this
narrative masterpiece, Faulkner allows the reader to go inside the mind of
each of his characters — even the deceased woman whose lifeless body is
being transported across Mississippi.
3- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The beloved and oft-banned classic is a hilarious romp down the
Mississippi River, featuring Mark Twain’s stellar wit, unparalleled ear
for dialect, and social commentary.
4- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
An early feminist classic, Chopin’s short novel follows Edna
Pontellier, a New Orleans wife and mother who falls in love while on
vacation and returns home to find that she can no longer stand to
devote herself to social obligations and domestic drudgery. Although
Edna’s fate is ultimately tragic, her embrace of an artist’s life and
journey to independence make her one of American literature’s first
liberated women. — Judy Berman
5- Beloved by Toni Morrison
Morrison, herself a a Ohio native, is not really a Southern writer,
butBeloved‘s study of the psychological aftermath of slavery in the
post-war Midwest is deeply rooted in the Southern tradition.
6- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Walker’s heartbreaking epistolary novel follows a young black
woman who struggles to find herself amid much adversity at the hands
of her cruel, abusive husband, but whose journey for independence
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and self-actualization is ultimately rewarded in the (thankfully) happy
conclusion.
7- one With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic melodrama is, sure, a typical
romance novel set amid the Civil War and the years following it, but it
is also one of the most enduring popular novels to come out of the
South in the first half of the 20th century.
8- Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice
Anne Rice launched her empire of Southern Gothic horror with this
classic novel set primarily in pre-Civil War Louisiana, with jaunts to
19th-century Europe.
9- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Ellison’s debut novel, which earned him the National Book Award, is
an engaging and explosive study of the Southern black experience,
taking its unnamed narrator from the painful realities of a Southern
black community to Harlem.
10-
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
This abolitionist classic is credited with sparking the movement that
led to the Civil War. The best-selling novel of the 19th century, it’s
now a bit antiquated (more sophisticated readers will see that its
characters are thinly drawn stereotypes of African Americans), but it’s
worth reading as a historical text.
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Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
Although she’s known for her popular (and, in my opinion, vastly
superior) short story collections, Flannery O’Connor’s first published
book was her debut novel, Wise Blood, which includes her usual
blend of a darkly comic sensibility and unavoidable religious themes.
10 best North American novels of all time
Fear and Loathing, The Grapes of Wrath, Moby-Dick: we pick the big,
brave and occasionally brash best North American novels ever written
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The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
Uniquely among male novelists of his era, Hawthorne’s compelling story
of the callous judgment meted out to an unmarried mother by the puritans
of Boston, Massachusetts, is a moving and thoughtful study of society’s
ambivalent and contradictory treatment of women.
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville (1851)
“In landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God,”
says wandering sailor Ishmael, as he sets sail with vengeful Quaker
Captain Ahab on the hunt for the monstrous white whale that maimed
him. Fathoms deep in allusion and nautical nomenclature.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain (1884)
Set in the geographic centre of the antebellum US, the sequel to The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the colourful tale of an abused and
motherless boy’s coming of age along the Mississippi River which wittily
challenged America’s perception of itself as the “sivilized” land of the
free.
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The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton (1905)
Caught between her entitled taste for luxury and her yearning for true
love, Lily Bart, the beautiful and intelligent heroine of this acutely
observed novel slowly slithers down the rungs of superficial New York
society to a tragic end.
The Call of the Wild
Jack London (1903)
When men “groping in the Arctic darkness” strike gold, a proud St
Bernard-Scotch Collie called Buck is sold into sledgehauling slavery. It’s
survival of the fittest in what E L Doctorow described as this most
“fervently American” club and fang adventure.
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck (1939)
“I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags,” Steinbeck said
of his novel about a poor family of “Okies” driven from their land in the
Great Depression. It was the main reason he was awarded the 1962 Nobel
Prize for Literature.
Independence Day
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Richard Ford (1995)
The second book in Ford’s trilogy about Frank Bascombe – sportswriter
turned realtor. Coiner of such quirky phrases as “happy as goats” and
“solitary as Siberia” Bascombe’s been described as “America’s most
convincing everyman”. Ford says he’s “asleep at the switch”.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Hunter S Thompson (1971)
Described by Tom Wolfe as a “scorching epochal sensation”, this
reckless, drugfuelled “gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities
of life in this country” is a funny, furious and disorienting attack on the
American Dream by the original gonzo journalist.
Beloved
Toni Morrison (1987)
With an epigraph of “60 Million and more” dedicated to victims of the
Atlantic slave trade, this psychologically complex, Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel is about a former slave who kills her infant daughter rather than
allow her to be recaptured.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers (1940)
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The debut of a 23-year-old author, this small-town drama set in the
Depression-era South tells of a teenage girl, an African-American doctor,
an alcoholic socialist, and a taciturn diner owner who all think the local
deaf-mute “gets” them. He doesn’t.
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lionel Shriver (2003)
Even to his mother, Kevin Katchadourian has been a creature of “opaque
predilections” since birth. But she spends this novel trying to work out
why her son committed a school massacre.Was her snobbery about her
fellow Americans a cause?
THE OTHER CONTENDERS
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
The Great Gatsby
F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway (1940)
Rabbit, Run
John Updike (1960)
The Color Purple
Alice Walker (1982)
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