Southern Renaissance

Southern Literature after the Civil War

• The antebellum South produced little of lasting literary merit, other than perhaps the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The most influential writers of the time were humorists, without literary pretensions, but who may have influenced Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, who published his first sketches in 1865, and who showed signs of the "regionalist" or "local color" writing that would develop. In 1884, he published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

• Other literary developments at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries were naturalism and realism, from such novelists as:

  • Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, realism of the war

  • Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, realism of the parlor

  • Frank Norris, McTeague, naturalism, who documented the harsher realities of American life during this period and who described realism as "the drama of the broken teacup."

Southern Regionalism and Local Color

• From the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, UNC Press, Editors Charles Wilson and William Ferris, eds.

  • Although the terms regionalism and local color are sometimes used interchangeably, regionalism generally has broader connotations.

  • Local color is the term often applied to a specific literary mode that flourished in the late 19th century, while regionalism implies recognized differences among specific areas of the country.

  • Although there is evidence of regional awareness in early southern writing, it is not until well into the 19th century that regional considerations begin to overshadow national ones. In the South, the regional concern became more and more evident in essays and fiction exploring and often defending the southern way of life.

Southern Regionalism and Local Color

• From the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, UNC Press, Editors Charles Wilson and William Ferris, eds.

  • The South played a major role in the local color movement that followed the Civil War. Most date the beginning of the movement to Bret Harte’s publication of stories about California mining camps in the Overland Monthly, 1868. But a disproportionate number of those contributing local color stories to national magazines were southerners.

  • The origins of the local color movement are not surprising. The end of the Civil War signaled the victory of nationalism over regional interests.

  • Following the war, as society became more urbanized and industrialized, regional differences began to disappear. Not surprising, there was interest in and “a developing nostalgia” for those remaining regional differences.

  • In addition to being regional, local color writing is often rural and such stories met a need for simpler times and faraway places.

Southern Regionalism and Local Color

• From the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, UNC Press, Editors Charles Wilson and William Ferris, eds.

  • Local color writing encompassed a number of regions, including New England and the Midwest; Sarah Orne Jewett, writing about the southern Maine seacoast (A White Heron) is one such example of American regionalism. And in the West, it began with Harte Crane.

  • But in the South, local color had a special quality—the mystique of the Lost Cause.

  • Many stories written about life in the antebellum South idealized the way things were before the war. In these stories, the South was often pictured not as it actually had been but as it "might have been."

Southern Regionalism and Local Color

• From the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, UNC Press, Editors Charles Wilson and William Ferris, eds.

  • Thomas Nelson Page is representative of this writing. His tales of Virginia plantation life picture beautiful southern maidens, noble and brave slave-owners, and happy, contented slaves.

  • Although not all southern local color writing depicted the South in such romanticized terms, the exotic and quaint characteristics of this region were dominant motifs. In other words, the beginnings of the Southern myth.

  • Plantation fiction is in fact a sub-genre as are slave narratives.

  • This is literature following the Civil War; the Southern Renaissance begins just following World War I when once again, life as it had been shifts dramatically.

Southern Renaissance (from Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South, 2013)

• This term “Southern Renaissance” originated with Allen Tate, critic, essayist, and poet who, in 1945, recognized "a remarkable surge of literature originating in the U.S. South from the early 1920s to at least the mid-1940s," a literature that shared unique features.

• Many important Southern writers started their careers in the 1920s, just after World War I, among them Zora Neale Hurston, Erskine Caldwell, Thomas Wolfe, and of course William Faulkner, whom Tate called "the most powerful and original novelist in the United States and one of the best in the modern world."

Southern Renaissance (from Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South, 2013)

• The "second generation" of such writers included Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, Tennessee Williams, and many more.

• Since this first idea of a definable movement was first proposed, it has been expanded "chronologically, geographically, and ideologically." It's usefulness has also been questioned.

• In Tate's original conception of the Southern Renascence, it was a defining "moment at which the South moves with anxiety into the modern world as it looks back at a disappearing past."

Southern Renaissance (Open Textbook Pilot Project, UC Davis)

• The first wave of writers in the Southern Renaissance probed a number of themes, but for the most part the writers had to come to terms with the South’s past, particularly slavery. Racial tensions, racial inequality, white guilt associated with slavery, and the haunting specter of slavery became themes and motifs throughout the literature.

• Writers also attempted to define the South as a distinct and unique place rather than simply as a region of the United States, especially within the context of social and economic changes that were beginning to erase the distinctive features of the South.

• Narrative techniques in the literature from this time period are often borrowed from oral storytelling or from other oral traditions in Southern culture, traditions such as preaching, conversing, and memorializing.

Southern Renaissance (Open Textbook Pilot Project, UC Davis)

• First Wave writers, like their Local Color predecessors, attempted to capture in print the distinctive features of Southern dialects that were beginning to disappear.

• Religion and religious images infused much of Southern writing during this time.

• A particular sub-genre of Southern writing emerged: the Southern gothic story or novel. Southern gothic writing borrowed from elements of eighteenth-century British works written in the style of Gothic, or “Dark Romanticism.” In these stories the fantastic and the macabre were central. In the Southern gothic, writers focused less on supernatural events and more on ways in which the seemingly pretty, orderly surface veneer of the Southern social order hid deep, dark, disturbing secrets or distorted the dark nature of reality behind the curtain of respectability and gentility.

Southern Renaissance (Open Textbook Pilot Project, UC Davis)

• Most Southern gothic works also contain some aspect of the grotesque as well. This sub-genre of Southern literature, often termed the Southern grotesque, features images of physical disfigurement, physical decay, mental disability, incest, deviance, extreme violence, illness, suffering, and death. The grotesque motif features prominently in most Southern gothic stories and comments, usually, on some aspect of a disintegrating people and culture.

Southern Renaissance (from Eastern Connecticut State Univ.)

• For much of American history, when people talked about American literature, they were really talking about literature produced in (and often written about) the northeastern United States.

• While regionalism helped to change this, it was the literary flowering of the first half of the twentieth century that finally brought southern literature to national prominence. This flowering is generally referred to as the Southern Renaissance.

• The poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom, the plays of Tennessee Williams, and the fiction of Warren, Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty made southern literature a force to be reckoned with.