"What is the Southern Renaissance? Who are its major figures? Why did it happen? What role did William Faulkner play in its advent? These are some of the questions scholars attempted to answer at the 1981 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. The history of the Southern Renaissance has not yet been written, and its relationship to its leading figure, William Faulkner, has still not been fully explored. At the 1981 conference entitled "Faulkner and the Southern Renaissance," noted scholars of Southern literary history gathered to define and describe this startling literary phenomenon. It was in the 1930s that the rest of the nation first noticed that something important was happening in the South. A powerful and eloquent new voice was issuing from a seemingly improbable place, the rural, agrarian Southland. In every literary genre, an emphatically Southern accent was making itself known, and today that accent is still being heard all over the world. Faulkner was the first and unquestionably the greatest exponent of this new Southern literature, but his voice was soon joined by a chorus of others: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, James Dickey, Richard Wright, Walker Percy, William Styron, Reynolds Price, ElizabethSpencer, and a host of others. This literary flowering, this amazing proliferation of Southern letters which began in the 1930s and continues to the present day, is called the Southern Renaissance. The papers contained in this volume take a major step toward explaining this extended period of extraordinary literary productivity. Together, these essays form a philosophical as well as critical inquiry into a cultural movement that resists simple or rigid categorizations." -- Publisher.

It began in the 1930s in a powerful and elegant literature arising from a seemingly improbable place, the rural, agrarian South. This literary flowering, a proliferation of Southern letters, is called the Southern Renaissance. Although the definitive history of the Southern literary renaissance has yet to be written, its leading figure, without question, was William Faulkner. Helping to define and describe this startling literary phenomenon and Faulkner's place in it are papers of eight noted scholars included in this collection. Brooks, Rubin, King, Minter, Watkins, Samway, Blackburn, and Spencer, one of the authors whose fiction is identified with the movement, focus their papers upon the philosophical and critical aspects of the Southern Renaissance.

Authors discussed include: Wendell Berry, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote, Zora Neal Hurston, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, William Styron, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, and many more. By World War II, the Southern Renaissance had established itself as one of the most significant literary events of the century, and today much of the best American fiction is southern fiction. Though the flowering of realistic and local-color writing during the first two decades of the century was a sign of things to come, the period between the two world wars was the crucial one for the South's literary development: a literary revival in Richmond came to fruition; at Vanderbilt University a group of young men produced The Fugitive, a remarkable, controversial magazine that published some of the century's best verse in its brief run; and the publication and widespread recognition of Faulkner (among others) inaugurated the great flood of southern writing that was to follow in novels, short stories, poetry, and plays. With more than forty years of experience writing and reading about the subject, and friendships with many of the figures discussed, J. A. Bryant is uniquely qualified to provide the first comprehensive account of southern American literature since 1900. Bryant pays attention to both the cultural and the historical context of the works and authors discussed, and presents the information in an enjoyable, accessible style. No lover of great American literature can afford to be without this book.

This perceptive study of a major cultural movement shows how Southern writers of 1930 t0 1955 tried to come to terms with Southern tradition, and discusses the resulting body of significant literature - fiction, poetry, memoirs, and historical writing.

In the South, railroads have two meanings: they are an economic force that can sustain a town and they are a metaphor for the process of southern industrialization. Recognizing this duality, Joseph Millichap's Dixie Limited is a detailed reading of the complex and often ambivalent relationships among technology, culture, and literature that railroads represent in selected writers and works of the Southern Renaissance. Tackling such Southern Renaissance giants as Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and William Faulkner, Millichap mingles traditional American and Southern studies—in their emphases on literary appreciation and evaluation in terms of national and regional concerns—with contemporary cultural meaning in terms of gender, race, and class. Millichap juxtaposes Faulkner's semi-autobiographical families with Wolfe's fiction, which represents changing attitudes toward the "Southern Other." Faulkner's later fiction is compared to that of Warren, Welty, and Ellison, and Warren's later poetry moves toward the contemporary post-Southernism of Dave Smith. These disparate examples suggest the subject of the final chapter—the continuing search for post-Southern patterns of persistence and change that reiterate, reject, and perhaps reconfigure the Southern Renaissance. As we enter the twenty-first century, that we recall how much the twentieth-century South was shaped by railroads built in the nineteenth century. It is also important that we recognize how much our future will be determined by the technological and cultural tracks we lay.