The literature of the contemporary South might best be understood for its discontinuity with the literary past. At odds with traditions of the Southern Renascence, southern literature of today sharply refutes the Nashville Agrarians and shares few of Faulkner's and Welty's concerns about place, community, and history. This sweeping study of the literary South's new direction focuses on nine well established writers who, by breaking away from the firmly ensconced myths, have emerged as an iconoclastic generation- -- Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Randall Kenan, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and Barry Hannah. Resisting the modernist methods of the past, they have established their own postmodern ground beyond the shadow of their predecessors. This shift in authorial perspective is a significant indicator of the future of southern writing. Crews's seminal role as a ground-breaking "poor white" author, Mason's and Crews's portrayals of rural life, and Allison's and Brown's frank portrayals of the lower class pose a challenge to traditional depictions of the South. The dissenting voices of Gibbons and Kenan, who focus on gender, race, and sexuality, create fiction that is at once identifiably "southern" and also distinctly subversive. Gibbons's iconoclastic stance toward patriarchy, like the outsider's critique of community found in Kenan's work, proffers a portrait of the South unprecedented in the region's literature. Ford, McCarthy, and Hannah each approach the South's traditional notions of history and community with new irreverence and treat familiar southern topics in a distinctly postmodern manner. Whether through Ford's generic consumer landscape, the haunted netherworld of McCarthy's southern novels, or Hannah's riotous burlesque of the Civil War, these authors assail the philosophical and cultural foundations from which the Southern Renascence arose. Challenging the conventional conceptions of the southern canon, this is a provocative and innovative contribution to the region's literary study.

How could liberalism and apartheid coexist for decades in our country, as they did during the first half of the twentieth century? This study looks at works by such writers as Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison to show how representations of time in southern narrative first accommodated but finally elucidated the relationship between these two political philosophies. Although racial segregation was codified by U.S. law, says Leigh Anne Duck, nationalist discourse downplayed its significance everywhere but in the South, where apartheid was conceded as an immutable aspect of an anachronistic culture. As the nation modernized, the South served as a repository of the country's romantic notions: the region was represented as a close-knit, custom-bound place through which the nation could temper its ambivalence about the upheavals of progress. The Great Depression changed this. Amid economic anxiety and the international rise of fascism, writes Duck, "the trope of the backward South began to comprise an image of what the United States could become." As she moves from the Depression to the nascent years of the civil rights movement to the early cold war era, Duck explains how experimental writers in each of these periods challenged ideas of a monolithically archaic South through innovative representations of time. She situates their narratives amid broad concern regarding national modernization and governance, as manifest in cultural and political debates, sociological studies, and popular film. Although southern modernists' modes and methods varied along this trajectory, their purpose remained focused: to explore the mutually constitutive relationships between social forms considered "southern" and "national."

Winner of the 2018 Eudora Welty Prize When the United States entered World War I, parts of the country had developed industries, urban cultures, and democratic political systems, but the South lagged behind, remaining an impoverished, agriculture region. Despite New South boosterism, the culture of the early twentieth-century South was comparatively artistically arid. Yet, southern writers dominated the literary marketplace by the 1920s and 1930s. World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity before the South fully modernized. This shortfall created an inherent tension between the region's existing agricultural social structure and the processes of modernization, leading to distal modernism, a form of writing that combines elements of modernism to depict non-modern social structures. Critics have struggled to formulate explanations for the eruption of modern southern literature, sometimes called the Southern Renaissance. Pinpointing World War I as the catalyst, David A. Davis argues southern modernism was not a self-generating outburst of writing, but a response to the disruptions modernity generated in the region. In World War I and Southern Modernism, Davis examines dozens of works of literature by writers, including William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, and Claude McKay, that depict the South during the war. Topics explored in the book include contact between the North and the South, southerners who served in combat, and the developing southern economy. Davis also provides a new lens for this argument, taking a closer look at African Americans in the military and changing gender roles.

The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, James Smethurst reveals, but instead a time of profound response fr

Through detailed analyses of individual texts, from the earliest poetry through Go Down, Moses, Singal traces Faulkner's attempt to liberate himself from the powerful and repressive Victorian culture in which he was raised by embracing the Modernist culture of the artistic avant-garde. Most important, it shows how Faulkner accommodated the conflicting demands of these two cultures by creating a set of dual identities - one, that of a Modernist author writing on the most daring and subversive issues of his day, and the other, that of a southern country gentleman loyal to the conservative mores of his community. It is in the clash between these two selves, Singal argues, that one finds the key to making sense of Faulkner.

Louis Mazzari brings to the fore one of the most important figures of the southern regionalist movement in the New Deal era. His is the first biography of Arthur Raper, a progressive sociologist, writer, and public intellectual who advocated racial and social justice in the South when such views were not only unpopular but dangerous, effectively laying a foundation for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.Raper was one of the first white southern scholars to speak out against lynching, sharecropping, and tenant farming in his pioneering and highly influential books The Tragedy of Lynching(1933), Preface to Peasantry (1936), Sharecroppers All (1941), and Tenants of the Almighty (1943). He also contributed significantly to Gunnar Myrdal's important study of U.S. race relations, An American Dilemma (1944). Mazzari carefully dissects Raper's works, casting them in a larger historical context and examining both the acclaim and anger they elicited in the South. He portrays Raper as a political and social radical fighting against southern racial and economic problems during the country's transition from an agrarian culture to a modern one, in an effort to keep the region from falling even further behind in an increasingly sophisticated world. Hostility toward his beliefs eventually led Raper to leave the South. He worked on the reconstruction of Japan after World War II and in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East at the height of the Cold War, promoting the same mix of federal planning and local control he had practiced in the New Deal South.In the life of Arthur Raper, Mazzari locates a larger story of liberalism in the white South. Raised on a North Carolina tobacco farm and educated at Chapel Hill under Howard Odum, Raper was remarkable for taking up issues of race and class to advocate modern views in a part of the world where adherence to the past was almost pathological -- and then going on to advance a liberal modernist version of Jeffersonian democracy throughout the Third World. He looked critically at the causes of racial violence and successfully conveyed scientific sociology into broad circulation through mass culture.

Winner of the 2018 Eudora Welty Prize When the United States entered World War I, parts of the country had developed industries, urban cultures, and democratic political systems, but the South lagged behind, remaining an impoverished, agriculture region. Despite New South boosterism, the culture of the early twentieth-century South was comparatively artistically arid. Yet, southern writers dominated the literary marketplace by the 1920s and 1930s. World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity before the South fully modernized. This shortfall created an inherent tension between the region's existing agricultural social structure and the processes of modernization, leading to distal modernism, a form of writing that combines elements of modernism to depict non-modern social structures. Critics have struggled to formulate explanations for the eruption of modern southern literature, sometimes called the Southern Renaissance. Pinpointing World War I as the catalyst, David A. Davis argues southern modernism was not a self-generating outburst of writing, but a response to the disruptions modernity generated in the region. In World War I and Southern Modernism, Davis examines dozens of works of literature by writers, including William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, and Claude McKay, that depict the South during the war. Topics explored in the book include contact between the North and the South, southerners who served in combat, and the developing southern economy. Davis also provides a new lens for this argument, taking a closer look at African Americans in the military and changing gender roles.