Inventing Southern Literature

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I write about what I know; what is the truth. I know this other stuff is counterfeit, but they will always have the power. Most of my life was not spent with white people. My experience, I took for granted.

Inventing Southern Literature

This was in 63, when my father died. He told me this. Some of these discussions were more eventful than others.

All his children hit the floor. We get drunk and talk about years gone by It is getting to be a big joke: 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. In its simplest form, Southern literature consists of writing about the American South.

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However, "the South" is also a social, political, economic, and cultural construct that transcends these geographical boundaries. Southern literature occupies a liminal space within American culture. 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 , [1] and a strong sense of "place. Despite these common themes, there is debate as to what makes a literary work "Southern. Truman Capote , born and raised in the Deep South , is best known for his novel In Cold Blood , a piece with none of the characteristics associated with "southern writing. In addition, some famous Southern writers moved to the Northern U.

So while geography is a factor, the geographical location of the author is not the defining factor in Southern writing. During the 17th and 18th centuries, English colonists in the Southern part of the American colonies produced a number of notable works. Two of the most famous were early memoirs of Virginia: Captain John Smith 's account of the founding of Jamestown in the s and s, and William Byrd II 's secret plantation diary, kept in the early 18th century.

Both sets of recollections are critical documents in early Southern history. 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.

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.

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Like James Fenimore Cooper , Simms was strongly influenced by Walter Scott , and his works bore the imprint of Scott's heroic romanticism. 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. He followed in with one of the country's first science fictions, A Voyage to the Moon: 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 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 first-person account of black slavery in the antebellum South. The book depicts the life of its title character, a daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his black mistress, and her struggles under slavery.

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. These writers idealized the defeated South and its lost culture.

Prominent writers with this point of view included poets Henry Timrod , Daniel B. 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 , Mark Twain published what is arguably the most influential southern novel of the 19th century, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Kate Chopin was another central figure in post-Civil War Southern literature.

These stories offered not only a sociological portrait of a specific Southern culture but also furthered the legacy of the American short story as a uniquely vital and complex narrative genre. But it was with the publication of her second and final novel The Awakening that she gained notoriety of a different sort. The novel not only shocked audiences with its frank and unsentimental portrayal of female sexuality and psychology.

Southern United States literature

It paved the way for the Southern novel as both a serious genre based in the realism that had dominated the western novel since Balzac and one that tackled the complex and untidy emotional lives of its characters. Today she is widely regarded as not only one of the most important female writers in American literature, but one of the most important chroniclers of the post-Civil War South and one of the first writers to treat the female experience with complexity and without condescension.

During the first half of the 20th century, the lawyer, politician, minister, orator, actor, and author Thomas Dixon, Jr. Today Dixon is perhaps best known for writing a trilogy of novels about Reconstruction , one of which was entitled The Clansman , a book which would eventually become the inspiration for D. Griffith 's infamous film The Birth of a Nation. Overall Dixon wrote 22 novels, numerous plays and film scripts, [11] Christian sermons, and some non-fiction works during his lifetime.

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. During the s, Southern poetry thrived under the Vanderbilt " Fugitives ". 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 called for a return to the South's agrarian past and bemoaned the rise of Southern industrialism and urbanization.

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