WEEK 10

MAJOR WRITERS OF THE MODERN PERIOD (1900-1945) -

THE WORLD WARS

-THE SOUTHERN TALE

• Southern literature is writing about the South, but under that simple statement lie many complications. Geographically, the South can be as far flung as Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee in the North and Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas in the West. Topically, Southern writing can concern the South or a Southerner's experience elsewhere, but it can also include a Southerner's writing on a non-Southern topic from a non-Southern point of view, like Katherine Anne Porter's "Flowering Judas," set in Mexico and told by a high modernist, godlike narrator.

• From the late eighteenth century, as slavery became increasingly important to the Southern economy after the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, antebellum Southerners were more often than not characterized by Northerners and European visitors as lazy, despotic, cruel, irreligious, or, at the very least, ignorant and misguided, as in Connecticut-native Harriet Beecher Stowe's widely influential Uncle Tom's Cabin.

• Southerners responded to such vilification in three ways. The first was a retreat from the vexing particularities of time and place in a poetry of detached pastoral abstractions that could be set anytime, anywhere, as in works by Philip Pendleton Cooke, Thomas Holly Chivers, and Edgar Allan Poe.

• The second response to outside criticism was to wallow in it, to display Southern people, and indeed human nature as feckless, greedy, lazy, "no count," and uproariously, if vulgarly, funny, as in the work of the Southwestern humorists, such as George Washington Harris, Johnson Jones Hooper, Joseph Glover Baldwin, and their successor Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens).

• The third reaction was polemical, as in essays by Louisa McCord and George Fitzhugh, or in fictionalized polemics, such as plantation novels by John Pendleton Kennedy, William Gilmore Simms, Caroline Lee Hentz, and others.

• The plantation novel became an enduring genre in Southern literature, characterized by a benign patriarchal master and his pure and charitable wife presiding over child-like blacks in the plantation "family."

• Slave narratives, like those of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, provided quite a different version of plantation life

• As a genre southern local color writing flourished through the 1890s, after which this genteel mode of writing lost popularity. At the turn of the century regional writing in the South was still evident, as in the Virginia-based novels of Ellen Glasgow, whose work attempted a more realistic depiction of the strength and weaknesses of the South. By the 1930s there was a resurgence of interest in regionalism, this time as an intellectual movement. Writers sought to treat each of the regions of the country as discrete geographical, cultural, and economic entities. Again the South played a major role in the regional movement. In fact, a cornerstone of the movement was the manifesto I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners, published in 1930.

• The authors of this work, among them John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, argued that the South, having held on to its agrarian culture longer than the rest of the country, could serve as a model for a society in which man rather than the machine was dominant. Citing the dehumanization brought about by industrialization and the assembly line, the authors posited that, although the South would not remain entirely agriculturally based, the southern way of life was more conducive to a full relationship between man and his surroundings.