By Jefferson Humphries
The recent South--replete with procuring shops, hub airports, informed African american citizens, and immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Haiti--is nonetheless haunted through the Gothic ghosts of its prior. Does the collision among previous and current account for the ongoing preeminence of Southern writers in America's literary tradition? Bobbie Ann Mason, Ernest Gaines, Rita Mae Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Cormac McCarthy, Dorothy Allison, and Allan Gurganus are only some of the writers who draw on a brand new type of Southern heritage whereas achieving out to a large American readership. but lots of those writers were accused of catering to the stereotypes they suspect a countrywide viewers calls for. it will appear that questions of Southern id remain sure up with rage opposed to assaults on Southern culture.Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe have assembled a awesome group of students and writers to check elements of the modern literature of the South. From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Fred Hobson to esteemed student James Olney to poets Kate Daniels and Brenda Marie Osbey, the individuals attempt to outline Southern tradition this day and ask who might be writing Southern literature day after today. Addressing subject matters reminiscent of humor, the prior, black autobiography, ethnicity, and feminine oral traditions, the essays shape a quantity that's of curiosity to readers of Southern literature and heritage, artistic writers, and students and scholars of Southern tradition.
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Extra info for The Future of Southern Letters
Sample text
It works both ways: the unsatisfactory nature of the history-diminished genetic father has cast emphasis on grandfatherly figures; and grandfatherly figures, in their inevitable distance, represent that absence of full human presence implicit in the excessive demands that this quasi-religious southern father-role imposes on any real human being. Even Lee's father was distant, as Davidson portrays him: I can hardly remember my father's look, I cannot Answer his voice as he calls farewell in the misty Mounting where riders gather at gates .
The assumed society was the sounding chamber for her implications. If you try that now, the detail may seem antiquated or worse, cliched. Write how some people still actually speak, and see if it doesn't make you groan and think of Tobacco Road or Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. There's still a lot of sheriffs out there with cowboy hats, big fat bellies, and mirror shades, but try getting away with using one as a character. James Dickey was the last serious writer able to do that, and he probably only succeeded because he had so much temperamentally in common with the type.
Yet we do, in a sense. And whether we quite realize it or not, it is partly because of this preponderance of the past over the present. The prominence of an enveloping, affectladen atmosphere in southern writing is, in psychological terms, a projected, unacknowledged love-rage suffusing the vision. The entombments, the claustrophobias, began with Poe. The Gothic houses holding forbidden emotional attachments, buried and unburied corpses—these houses of regressive emotion and incest typify a region unable to escape its traumatic history and therefore unable to progress into a usable present and future.