Southern United States literature

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. Characteristics of Southern literature include a focus on a common Southern history, the significance of family, a sense of community and one’s role within it, the region's dominant religion (Christianity — see Protestantism) and the burdens/rewards religion often brings, issues of racial tension, land and the promise it brings, a sense of social class and place, and the use of the Southern dialect.

Modern definition The states in dark red are almost always included in modern day definitions of the South, while those in medium red are usually included. The striped states are sometimes/occasionally considered Southern

Overview of Southern literature

In its simplest form, Southern literature consists of writing about the American South, with the South being defined for historical as well as geographical reasons as the states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, West Virginia and Arkansas.

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, and a strong sense of "place." The South's troubled history with racial issues also continually appears in its literature.

Despite these common themes, what makes writers and their literature Southern is often debated. For example, Mark Twain, arguably the father of Southern literature, defined the characteristics that many people associate with Southern writing in his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He even referred to himself as a "Southern writer." Despite this, his birthplace of Missouri is not traditionally considered to be part of The South. In addition, many famous Southern writers headed to the Northern U.S. as soon as they were old enough to make it on their own. So while geography is a factor, the geographical birth of the author is not the defining factor in Southern writing.

History of Southern literature

Early and antebellum literature

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 1610s and 1620s, 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. Writing in Charleston, the lawyer and essayist Hugh Swinton Legare, the poets Paul Hamilton Hayne and Henry Timrod, and the novelist William Gilmore Simms composed some of the most important works in antebellum Southern literature.

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. Like James Fenimore Cooper, Simms was strongly influenced by Walter Scott, and his works bore the imprint of Scott's heroic romanticism. In The Yemassee, The Kinsmen, and the anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novel The Sword and the Distaff, Simms presented idealized portraits of slavery and Southern life. 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.

Some critics regard Poe himself as a Southern author -- he was raised in Richmond, attended the University of Virginia, and edited the Southern Literary Messenger from 1835 to 1837. 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 1836 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. Harriet Jacobs, meanwhile, recounted her experiences in bondage in North Carolina in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. And another Southern-born ex-slave, William Wells Brown, wrote Clotel; or, The President's Daughter -- widely believed to be the first novel ever published by an African-American. The book depicts the life of its title character, a daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his black mistress, and her struggles under slavery.

The "Lost Cause" years

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. Lucas and Sidney Lanier and fiction writer Thomas Nelson Page. 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 1884, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, published what is arguably the most influential southern novel of the 19th century, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ernest Hemingway said of the novel, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." This statement applies even more to southern literature because of the novel's frank dealings with issues such as race and violence. Kate Chopin was a major female writer of this period.

The Southern Renaissance

Main article: Southern Renaissance

In the 1920s and '30s, a renaissance in Southern literature began with the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Tennessee Williams, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Thomas Wolfe, and Robert Penn Warren, among others. 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 1920s, Southern poetry thrived under the Vanderbilt University "Fugitives." In nonfiction, H.L. Mencken's popularity increased nationwide as he continued to shock and astound readers with his satiric writing that highlighted the deficiencies 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. They noted that creativity and industrialism weren't compatible and desired the return to the lifestyle that would afford the Southerner leisure (a quality the Agrarians most felt conducive to creativity). Writers like Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, also brought new techniques such as stream of consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their writings. For instance, his novel As I Lay Dying is told by changing narrators ranging from the deceased Addie to her young son.

The late 1930s also saw the publication of one of the most well-known Southern novels, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. The novel, published in 1936, quickly became a bestseller. It won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize, and in 1939 an equally famous movie of the novel premiered. Southern literature became popular across genres; children's books like Ezekiel, published in 1937 by writer/illustrators like Elvira Garner, drew audiences outside the South.

From the 1940s onward, Southern literature grew thematically as it embraced the social and cultural changes in the South resulting from the American Civil Rights Movement. In addition, more female and African American writers began to be accepted as part of Southern literature, including African Americans such as Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Allen Brown, and Dori Sanders, along with women such as Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Ellen Glasgow, Carson McCullers, and Shirley Ann Grau, among many others. Other well-known Southern writers of this period include Reynolds Price, James Dickey, Davis Grubb and Walker Percy. One of the most highly praised Southern novels of the 20th century, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, won the Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1960. Another famous novel of the 1960s is A Confederacy of Dunces, written by New Orleans native John Kennedy Toole in the 1960s but not published until 1980 -- won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 and has since become a cult classic.

Southern literature today

Today the American South is undergoing a number of cultural and social changes, including rapid industrialization and an influx of immigrants to the region. As a result, the exact definition of what constitutes southern literature is changing. Some critics specify that the previous definitions of southern literature still hold, with some of them suggesting, only somewhat in jest, that all southern literature must still contain a dead mule within its pages [1]. Still, the successful crime novels of James Lee Burke are not ashamed of making a point of their own southernness and their nationwide popularity has been attributed to their southern appeal [2].

Others, though, say that the very fabric of the South has changed so much that the old assumptions about southern literature no longer hold. For example, Truman Capote, born and raised in the Deep South, is best known for his novel In Cold Blood, a piece with absolutely none of the characteristics associated with "southern writing." Other southern writers, such as popular author John Grisham, rarely write about traditional southern literary issues at all. John Berendt, who wrote the popular Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, is not a Southerner.

Among the prominent southern writers today are Tim Gautreaux, Flannery O'Connor, Barry Hannah, William Gay, Pat Conroy, Fannie Flagg, Randall Kenan, Ernest Gaines, Erskine Caldwell, John Grisham, Mary Hood, Lee Smith, Tom Robbins, Tom Wolfe, Wendell Berry, Cormac McCarthy, Anne Rice, Edward P. Jones, Barbara Kingsolver, Willie Morris, Anne Tyler, Larry Brown, Allan Gurganus, Clyde Edgerton, Daniel Wallace, Kaye Gibbons, Nicholas Sparks, Winston Groom and Lewis Nordan.

Selected journals

• Black Warrior Review - Published by University of Alabama
• Southern Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine — (1835–1837)
• Sewanee Review — America's oldest continuously published literary quarterly (published at the University of the South)
• Southern Literary Journal — (1964-present)
• Mississippi Quarterly — A refereed, scholarly journal dedicated to the life and culture of the American South, past and present. [3]
• The Oxford American — A quarterly journal of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography, and music from and about the South.
• The Southern Review — The famous literary journal focusing on southern literature. [4]
• storySouth — A journal of new writings from the American South. Features fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and more. [5]
• Dead Mule School of Southern Literature — Showcases all aspects of southern writing from contemporary voices to cliched vernacular, from short fiction, poetry, and essays to photography. [6]
• Southern Cultures — Journal from the Center for the Study of the American South [7]
• Southern Literary Review — Book reviews, profiles of southern authors, and a directory of southern authors by state. [8]
• Southern Scribe — News and reviews about southern literature (including a helpful calendar of pertinent events). [9]
• Southern Spaces — Peer-Reviewed Internet journal examining the spaces and places of the American South. [10]

Further reading

• Southern Literature From 1579-1895 by Louise Manly
• Anderson, Eric Gary. "On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession" Southern Spaces. August 9 2007.
• "Caroline Lee Hentz's Long Journey" by Philip D. Beidler. Alabama Heritage Number 75, Winter 2005.
• The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs. Edited by Joseph Flora, Lucinda MacKethan, Todd Taylor, and Todd W. Taylor. Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
• Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris. University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
• The History of Southern Literature by Louis Rubin. Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
• The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition: What Every American Needs to Know Edited by James Trefil, Joseph F. Kett, and E. D. Hirsch. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
• "An Overview of Southern Literature by Genre" by Lucinda MacKethan. Southern Spaces, Feb. 2004.
• Walker Percy and Southern Literature. Explores the overall issues surrounding what makes for southern literature.
• Am I a Southerner? Pop culture article discussing Southern cultural mores in literature and in general.
• History of Southern Literature online publishing. Since 1995 the American South has relied on the School of Southern Literature.
• Where is the South in Today's Southern Literature? Article exploring 2002 changes in southern literature.
• The Dead Mule Rides Again Explanation of what constitutes "good" southern writing.

External links

• The Fellowship of Southern Writers
• Library of Southern Literature, University of North Carolina American Southern literature pre-1929.
• Emory University Archives Manuscript sources for southern literature.
• List of the 125 greatest southern books
• The Center for Southern Literature
• Society for the Study of Southern Literature
• A Checklist of Scholarship on Southern Literature An checklist of scholarship on writers associated with the American South. Sponsored by Mississippi Quarterly.
• Adjudicated List of Contemporary Southern Authors Registry of Southern writers nominated by their state arts council based on the quality of their work.
• Southern Gothic Shorts Short Story Writing Competition
• Southern Poetry from Holman Prison Death Row Inmate Darrell Grayson
• "Poets in Place," at Southern Spaces.