Exploding the southern text: Reconsidering southern literature as a critically constructed genre.

Abstract

What is southern literature? My study examines the role literary critics have played in constructing a generic classification often taken to be objectively observable. The genre's most influential spokesman, Louis D. Rubin, argues that modern southern literature is self-consciously historical, chronicling the region's defeat and loss and its attempt to restore cultural order following the Civil War. While I concur that a preoccupation with history is a characteristic of many southern writers, I contend that Rubin's perception of what that trait signifies is too limited because of his over-emphasis upon the Southern Agrarians' tragic vision of southern history. His view implies that the south is inhabited and written about only by Deep South white males fallen from the plantation class, and it results in the exclusion of numerous writers who also treat the south--particularly women, blacks, and the lower classes who perceive the southern past with something other than the nostalgic desire to recreate the Old Order. Drawing upon the theoretical work of Frederic Jameson and Hayden White, I demonstrate that when we consider writers of a different gender, race, or class than conventionally represented within the southern canon, we discover that the south's historical sensibility manifests itself in multiple ways. I illustrate through readings of Caroline Gordon's Penhally and Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground that white women writers embraced the opportunity for remaking both personal and cultural identity in the aftermath of the Civil War rather than clinging to the tenets of the past. Through interpretations of Arna Bontemps' Black Thunder and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God I explore how black southern writers focused not upon shame and degradation as central legacies of the slave system, but upon the strength to be drawn from the race's folk history. And by examining Elizabeth Madox Roberts' The Time of Man and Myra Page's Daughter of the Hills, I demonstrate how writers of the mountain south tended to focus upon a communal oral history that serves as a source of continuity in a culture adapting from subsistence agriculture to industrialization. By introducing these overlooked facets of the historical perspective of southern writers into the genre, we come closer to a more materially accurate understanding of both the literature and the region.