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A COMPANION TO
THE LITERATURE ANDCULTURE OF THEAMERICAN SOUTH
Edited byRichard Gray and Owen Robinson
Gray/A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South Final Proof 9.3.2004 11:06am page iii
A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South
Gray/A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South Final Proof 9.3.2004 11:06am page i
Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements
and certain major authors, in literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide
new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts,
orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experi-
enced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered
and developed by leading scholars in the field.
Published
1 A Companion to Romanticism Edited by Duncan Wu
2 A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture Edited by Herbert F. Tucker
3 A Companion to Shakespeare Edited by David Scott Kastan
4 A Companion to the Gothic Edited by David Punter
5 A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare Edited by Dympna Callaghan
6 A Companion to Chaucer Edited by Peter Brown
7 A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake Edited by David Womersley
8 A Companion to English Renaissance Literature Edited by Michael Hattaway
and Culture
9 A Companion to Milton Edited by Thomas N. Corns
10 A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry Edited by Neil Roberts
11 A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature Edited by Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne
12 A Companion to Restoration Drama Edited by Susan J. Owen
13 A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing Edited by Anita Pacheco
14 A Companion to English Renaissance Drama Edited by Arthur F. Kinney
15 A Companion to Victorian Poetry Edited by Richard Cronin, Antony H.
Harrison and Alison Chapman
16 A Companion to the Victorian Novel Edited by Patrick Brantlinger and
William B. Thesing
A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works
17 A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Edited by Richard Dutton
Volume I: The Tragedies and Jean E. Howard
18 A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Edited by Richard Dutton
Volume II: The Histories and Jean E. Howard
19 A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Edited by Richard Dutton
Volume III: The Comedies and Jean E. Howard
20 A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume IV: Edited by Richard Dutton
The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays and Jean E. Howard
21 A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America Edited by Charles L. Crow
22 A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism Edited by Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted
23 A Companion to the Literature and Culture of Edited by Richard Gray
the American South and Owen Robinson
24 A Companion to American Fiction 1780–1865 Edited by Shirley Samuels
25 A Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914 Edited by G.R. Thompson and Robert Paul Lamb
Gray/A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South Final Proof 9.3.2004 11:06am page ii
A COMPANION TO
THE LITERATURE ANDCULTURE OF THEAMERICAN SOUTH
Edited byRichard Gray and Owen Robinson
Gray/A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South Final Proof 9.3.2004 11:06am page iii
� 2004 by Blackwell Publishing Ltdexcept for editorial material and organization � 2004 by Richard Gray and Owen Robinson
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The right of Richard Gray and Owen Robinson to be identified as the Authors of the Editorial Material
in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
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transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
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First published 2004 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A companion to the literature and culture of the American south / edited by Richard Gray and Owen
Robinson.
p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to literature and culture; 23)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-631-22404-1 (alk. paper)
1. American literature–Southern States–History and criticism–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Authors,
American–Homes and haunts–Southern States–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. Southern
States–Intellectual life–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 4. Southern States–In literature–Handbooks, manuals,
etc. 5. Southern States–Civilization–Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Gray, Richard J. II. Robinson, Owen.
III. Series.
PS261.C555 2004
810.9’975–dc22
2003020737
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Gray/A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South Final Proof 9.3.2004 11:06am page iv
To Sheona To EstherR.G. O.R.
Gray/A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South Final Proof 9.3.2004 11:06am page v
Gray/A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South Final Proof 9.3.2004 11:06am page vi
Contents
Acknowledgments x
Notes on Contributors xii
List of Plates xviii
PART I Introduction 1
1 Writing Southern Cultures 3
Richard Gray
PART II Themes and Issues 27
2 The First Southerners: Jamestown’s Colonists as Exemplary Figures 29
Mary C. Fuller
3 Slave Narratives 43
Jerry Phillips
4 Plantation Fiction 58
John M. Grammer
5 The Slavery Debate 76
Susan-Mary Grant
6 Southern Writers and the Civil War 93
Susan-Mary Grant
7 Visualizing the Poor White 110
Stuart Kidd
8 Southern Appalachia 130
Linda Tate
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9 The Southern Literary Renaissance 148
Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.
10 The Native-American South 166
Mick Gidley and Ben Gidley
11 Southern Music 185
John White
12 Country Music 203
Barbara Ching
13 The Civil Rights Debate 221
Richard H. King
14 Southern Religion(s) 238
Charles Reagan Wilson
15 African-American Fiction and Poetry 255
R. J. Ellis
16 Southern Drama 280
Mark Zelinsky and Amy Cuomo
17 Sports in the South 297
Diane Roberts
18 The South Through Other Eyes 317
Helen Taylor
19 The South in Popular Culture 335
Allison Graham
PART III Individuals and Movements 353
20 Edgar Allan Poe 355
Henry Claridge
21 Southwestern Humor 370
John M. Grammer
22 Mark Twain 388
Peter Stoneley
23 Ellen Glasgow 403
Julius Rowan Raper
24 Fugitives and Agrarians 420
Andrew Hook
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viii Contents
25 William Faulkner 436
Richard Godden
26 Literature of the African-American Great Migration 454
Kate Fullbrook
27 Zora Neale Hurston 472
Will Brantley
28 Flannery O’Connor 486
Susan Castillo
29 Eudora Welty 502
Jan Nordby Gretlund
30 Oral Culture and Southern Fiction 518
Jill Terry
31 Recent and Contemporary Women Writers in the South 536
Sharon Monteith
32 The South in Contemporary African-American Fiction 552
A. Robert Lee
33 Writing in the South Now 571
Matthew Guinn
PART IV Afterword 589
34 Searching for Southern Identity 591
James C. Cobb
Index 608
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Contents ix
Acknowledgments
The debts I have accumulated in preparing this book are numerous. I owe a particular
debt, of course, to my co-editor, Owen Robinson, who has been tireless in his
preparation of the manuscript and organizing the collection into coherent shape. An
equal debt is owed to all the contributors, who have taken time off from enormously
busy schedules to produce what I believe is a series of outstanding essays. I would also
like to thank my friends and colleagues in the Southern Studies Forum, the British
Academy, and the British Association for American Studies – many of whom have also
contributed to this volume – for their advice and expert opinions. Thanks are due also
to my friends and students in the Department of Literature and to friends and
colleagues at Blackwell, especially Andrew McNeillie and Karen Wilson, for their
help and encouragement. Finally, my thanks are due to my family: my sons Ben and
Jack, my daughters Catharine and Jessica, my son-in-law Ricky, and my grandsons
Sam and Izzy – and, above all, to my wife Sheona. They have helped me to keep going
when at times the task of working on this collection seemed endless. I am, as always,
deeply grateful.
R.G.
My co-editor, Richard Gray, as well as being an inspiring scholar and colleague, is a
good friend whose encouragement, advice, and support I gratefully acknowledge.
I would also like to thank Karen Wilson and the editorial team at Blackwell, and the
many fine scholars whose work comprises this book, for making its production such a
cooperative and illuminating endeavor. Here in the Department of Literature, Film,
and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, colleagues, friends, and students – and
in particular Joe Allard, Emily Barker, Herbie Butterfield, John Cant, Becky Degler,
Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Mike Gray, Peter Hulme, Kim Lasky, David Musselwhite,
Jim Philip, Kay Stevenson, Erna Von Der Walde, and Luke Whiting – have continu-
ally helped to shape my understanding of the South, the Americas, and literature,
Gray/A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South Final Proof 9.3.2004 11:07am page x
variously through discussion, collaboration, criticism, and fine East Anglian ale. Most
of all, Esther Kober’s understanding, kindness, patience, and wit are a constant marvel
to me, her companionship a constant blessing.
O.R.
The editors and publisher also wish to thank the following for permission to use
copyright material: Extract from ‘‘The South’’ by Langston Hughes, from The Collected
Poems of Langston Hughes, 1994. Reprinted by permission of David Higham
Associates.
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Acknowledgments xi
Notes on Contributors
Will Brantley is a Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. He is
the author of Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir: Smith, Glasgow, Welty, Hellman, Porter,
and Hurston (1993) and articles on Evelyn Scott’s nonfiction and Lillian Smith’s FBI
file. He is editor of Conversations with Pauline Kael (1996), and is currently editing the
50th anniversary reissue of Lillian Smith’s Now Is the Time.
Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. is Professor and Chair of English at the University of
Arkansas. He has published widely in modern Southern literature and culture,
including his book Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and
the West. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a book on European
totalitarianism and the white Southern imagination, 1930–50.
Susan Castillo is Head of English Literature and John Nichol Professor of American
Literature at Glasgow University. She has published on early American writing,
Native-American fiction, and Southern literature. She is also a writer of poetry and
fiction; her book of verse, The Candlewoman’s Trade, was published in 2003. Although
she has lived abroad most of her adult life, she was born and grew up in the American
South, and defines herself as a Southerner.
Barbara Ching is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Memphis and
the author of Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture
(2001). With ethnographer Gerald W. Creed, she co-edited Knowing Your Place: Rural
Identity and Cultural Hierarchy (1996).
Henry Claridge lectures in American Literature and American Studies at the Uni-
versity of Kent. He has previously taught at the universities of Warwick, Massachu-
setts, and Indiana. He is the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Critical Assessments and
William Faulkner: Critical Assessments; an edition of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Assess-
ments, co-edited with Graham Clarke, is forthcoming. He has edited Hawthorne’s The
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Scarlet Letter and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He has also written on E. L. Doctorow,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the literary history of Chicago.
James C. Cobb is Spalding Distinguished Professor of History at the University of
Georgia. He has written widely on the economic, political, and cultural history of the
American South. He is currently completing Old South, New South, No South: A History
of Southern Identity.
Amy Cuomo is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the State University of West
Georgia, where she teaches and directs. Her research interests include Southern
drama, gender, film, and popular culture. Her recent work, ‘‘How to Break into
Film and Television,’’ was published in Southern Theatre.
R. J. Ellis is Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University. He currently edits
Comparative American Studies. His recent books include an edited collection of essays
on Faulkner and Modernism (2000) and a study of Harriet Wilson (2003). He has
published widely on African-American and Beat writing, including the monograph
Liar! Liar! – Jack Kerouac, Novelist (1999).
Kate Fullbrook was Professor of Literary Studies and Associate Dean in the Faculty
of Humanities, Languages, and Social Sciences at the University of the West of
England. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield (1986), Free Women: Ethics and
Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction (1990), and, with Edward Fullbrook,
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend
(1993) and Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction (1998). In addition, she pub-
lished many articles and reviews and worked extensively as an editor. Kate Fullbrook
died in 2003.
Mary C. Fuller is Associate Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Her publications on early modern travel include Voyages in Print: English
Travel to America, 1576–1624.
Ben Gidley is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban and Community Research at
Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research has focused on the politics of
race, identity, and belonging. His publications include The Proletarian Other: Charles
Booth and the Politics of Representation (2000), ‘‘Ghetto Radicalism: The Jewish East
End’’ in New Voices in Jewish Thought, Volume 2 (1999), and Reflecting Realities:
Participants’ Perspectives on Integrated Communities and Sustainable Development (with
Jean Anastacio et al., 2000).
Mick Gidley is Professor of American Literature at the University of Leeds. He has
published essays on a wide range of topics in American literature and culture,
including Faulkner, Cummings, and Bambara. His books include several on Indian
themes, such as Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated (2000) and
Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian Project in the Field (2003). Among the
collections of essays he has edited or co-edited are Views of American Landscapes (1989),
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Notes on Contributors xiii
Representing Others (1992), Modern American Culture (1993), and American Photographers
in Europe (1994). He is currently writing a study of the photographer Emil Otto
Hoppe.
Richard Godden teaches American literature and history at the University of Sussex.
He is the author of Fictions of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer (1990)
and Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (1997). He is
currently completing a study of Faulkner’s later fiction, provisionally entitled, Faul-
kner’s Residues: The Poetics of an Economy.
Allison Graham is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University
of Memphis. She is the author of Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race
During the Civil Rights Struggle (2001), co-producer/director of the documentary film
At the River I Stand (1993), and associate producer of the documentary film Hoxie: The
First Stand (2003).
John Grammer is Associate Professor of English at the University of the South, in
Sewanee, Tennessee, and author of Pastoral and Politics in the Old South. His essays and
reviews have appeared in American Literary History, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern
Literary Journal, and other publications.
Susan-Mary Grant is Reader in American History at the University of Newcastle-
upon-Tyne. She is the author of North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American
Identity in the Antebellum Era (2000), co-editor (with Brian Holden Reid) of The
American Civil War: Explorations and Reconsiderations (2000) and (with Peter J. Parish)
of Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War (2003). She is
currently working on the development of American nationalism between the Civil
War and World War I.
Richard Gray is Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of Essex.
His books include The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South,
Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (which won the C. Hugh Holman Award
from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature), American Poetry of the Twentieth
Century, The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography, Southern Aberrations: Writers
of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism and A History of American Literature.
He is also editor of a number of collections and anthologies, and a regular reviewer for
various newspapers and journals, including the Times Literary Supplement and the
Literary Review. He is the first specialist in American literature to be elected a Fellow
of the British Academy.
Jan Nordby Gretlund is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University
of Southern Denmark. He has held ACLS or Fulbright fellowships at Vanderbilt,
Southern Mississippi, and South Carolina’s universities. He is the author of Eudora
Welty’s Aesthetics of Place and Frames of Southern Mind: Reflections on the Stoic, Bi-Racial
and Existential South. He has co-edited four books: Realist of Distances: Flannery
O’Connor Revisited; Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher; Southern Landscapes; and The
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xiv Notes on Contributors
Late Novels of Eudora Welty; and has edited The Southern State of Mind (2000). He edited
a special Southern issue of American Studies in Scandinavia (spring 2001). He is a
member of the editorial board for the South Carolina Encyclopedia and a contributor to
that volume; and he is literary editor of the European Southern Studies Forum Newsletter.
He is writing a book on Madison Jones and editing a collection on Flannery
O’Connor, plus a collection on ‘‘the South as another place.’’
Matthew Guinn is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama at
Birmingham. He completed his PhD in 1998 at the University of South Carolina,
where he studied under the late James Dickey. He is the author of After Southern
Modernism: Fiction of the Contemporary South (2000).
Andrew Hook, Emeritus Bradley Professor of English Literature at the University of
Glasgow, is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edin-
burgh. He has published widely on English, Scottish, and American literature. His
seminal work Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations 1750–1835 is about
to be reissued. The Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies at Glasgow is named
in his honor.
Stuart Kidd lectures in American History at the University of Reading. He is co-
editor of The Roosevelt Years and the author of a number of articles and essays on the
cultural history of the United States during the 1930s. His monograph on FSA
photography and the South, The South Faces the Shutter: Roy Stryker, FSA Photography,
and the South, 1935–1943, will be published shortly.
Richard H. King teaches in the School of American and Canadian Studies at
Nottingham University. He is the author of A Southern Renaissance and Civil Rights
and the Idea of Freedom and has co-edited Dixie Debates with Helen Taylor.
A. Robert Lee, formerly of the University of Kent at Canterbury, is Professor
of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo. His recent books include Multi-
cultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American
Fictions (2003), Postindian Conversations, with Gerald Vizenor (2000), Designs of
Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998), and the
essay collections Herman Melville: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (2001), Loosening the
Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor (2000), and The Beat Generation Writers (1996).
Since 1998 he has been Annual Visiting Professor at Sunderland University.
Sharon Monteith is Reader in American Studies at the University of Nottingham.
She is the author of Advancing Sisterhood: Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern
Literature (2000) and co-editor of Gender in the Civil Rights Movement (1999) and South
To a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture (2002). She is currently writing a book on
representations of the civil rights movement in popular cinema.
Jerry Phillips is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut,
where he also directs the program in American Studies. He has published essays on
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Notes on Contributors xv
Herman Melville, Matthew Arnold, Thorstein Veblen, Richard Price, and Octavia
Butler. His essay on Edmund White is forthcoming in The Oxford Encyclopedia of
American Literature.
Julius Rowan Raper is Professor Emeritus of English from the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has published three books on Ellen Glasgow, including
From the Sunken Garden: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, 1916–1945. He is also the author
of Narcissus from Rubble: Competing Models of Character in Contemporary British and
American Fiction and an editor of Lawrence Durrell: Comprehending the Whole. In
addition, he has published essays on a variety of Southern and contemporary novelists,
as well as stories and poems.
Diane Roberts is Professor of English at the University of Alabama. Currently, she is
the author of two books, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood (1993) and The Myth of
Aunt Jemima (1994), as well as articles on Southern Livingmagazine, Eudora Welty, and
the Neo-Confederate Movement. She is an essayist for National Public Radio in the
United States and a writer and presenter of programs for BBC Radio 4 and the World
Service, and she contributes columns to The Times, The New York Times, and The
St. Petersburg Times. Her book about Florida, Dream State, was published in 2004.
Peter Stoneley is a Lecturer in the School of English at Queen’s University, Belfast.
He works for the most part on nineteenth-century American writing, and his most
recent book is Consumerism and American Girls’ Literature, 1860–1940 (2003).
Linda Tate is an Associate Professor of English at Shepherd College in Shepherds-
town, West Virginia. She is the author of A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the
Contemporary South (1994) and editor of Conversations with Lee Smith (2001). Her book
Power in the Blood: A Family Memoir, supported in part by a Rockefeller Humanities
Foundation Fellowship at Marshall University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and
Gender in Appalachia, is forthcoming.
Helen Taylor is Professor and Head of the School of English, University of Exeter.
She has published widely on Southern literature and culture, as well as women’s
writing. Her books include Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture Through a
Transatlantic Lens (2001), Dixie Debates (co-edited with Richard King, 1996), Scarlett’s
Women: Gone with the Wind and its Female Fans (1989), and Gender, Race, and Region in
the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (1989). She is
currently working on representations of Storyville, New Orleans, through the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Jill Terry completed her doctoral research on orality in fiction by contemporary
Southern women writers at the University of Exeter. She is Curriculum Leader for
English at the University College Worcester, where she teaches a number of courses in
American literatures. She has published on Alice Walker (Critical Survey, 2000) and
has a chapter forthcoming in an edited book on Gayl Jones.
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xvi Notes on Contributors
John White is Reader Emeritus in American History at the University of Hull. His
publications include Billie Holiday: Her Life and Times (1987), and Black Leadership in
America: From Booker T. Washington to Jesse Jackson (1990). He is co-editor (with Brian
Reid) of Americana: Essays in Memory of Marcus Cunliffe (1998), and (with Richard
Palmer) Larkin’s Jazz Essays and Reviews, 1940–84 (2001). His book The Best of
Intentions: Artie Shaw, His Life and Music is due to appear in 2004.
Charles Reagan Wilson is Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
and Professor of History and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is
the author of Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (1980), and
Judgement and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (1995). He co-
edited the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), and he is supervising production of a
second edition of the Encyclopedia and publication of the Mississippi Encyclopedia.
Mark Zelinsky, Assistant Professor of English at Saint Joseph College in West
Hartford, Connecticut, teaches a variety of theatre courses, including literature,
history, and acting, as well as directing two productions annually. He specializes in
American Drama with a particular interest in Tennessee Williams. Forthcoming
publications include an essay in the Tennessee Williams Literary Journal and articles
on Williams, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal in Notable Gays and Lesbians in American
Theater History. His most recent publication focused on the film and television
adaptations of A Streetcar Named Desire and appeared in Humanities in the South.
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Notes on Contributors xvii
Plates
1 Arthur Rothstein: Wife and child of a sharecropper, Washington
County, Arkansas, August 1935. 118
2 Marion Post Walcott: Farmers eat a lot of ice cream and drink lots of
beer while waiting for tobacco to be sold at auction sales outside
warehouse, Durham, North Carolina, November 1939. 121
3 Jack Delano: CIO pickets jeering at a few workers who were entering
a mill in Greensboro, Greene County, Georgia, May 1941. 123
4 John Vachon: A farmer plowing, Roanoke County, Virginia,
March 1941. 126
5 Will the Circle be Unbroken album cover. 212
6 A shotgun shack at the Shack Up Inn, Clarksdale, Mississippi. 350
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Part IIntroduction
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1
Writing Southern Cultures
Richard Gray
In 1931 John Peale Bishop wrote from France to his friend Allen Tate about the
deepening economic crisis in the West. ‘‘Personally I feel there is no hope for us,’’ he
confided to Tate,
unless we are willing to go back, examining our mistakes and admit them. To go on the
way of machinization and progress to their ultimate destination, some American form of
communism, is simply to applaud and hasten death. For death it will be, and no
mistake. The Russians may well survive, for they are the beginning of something non-
European; we are the end of all that is European. With us Western civilization ends.1
Bishop’s remarks hit a responsive chord with Tate, who only two years prior to this, in
his biography of Jefferson Davis, had identified the decline of the West with the
defeat of the South, a region he called ‘‘the last stronghold of European civilization in
the western hemisphere.’’ For both men, in fact, what they agreed to call ‘‘the South’’
was the last great moment in culture. All that was left was to capture the moment of
its passing and to commemorate its glory. More brutally, all that was left was the
reality of loss and the realization of failure. As Tate put it to Bishop:
The older I get themore I realize that I set out about ten years ago to live a life of failure, to
imitate, in my own life, the history of my people . . . The significance of the Southern way
of life, in my time, is failure . . .What else is there for me but a complete acceptance of
failure? There is no other ‘‘culture’’ that I can enter into, even if I had the desire.2
True, Tate admitted, the contemporary crisis might very well bring about something
devoutly to be wished: ‘‘the destruction of the middle-class capitalist hegemony.’’ But,
instead of millennial beginnings or cultural redemption, all that would result from
this, he believed, was a rough beast slouching from Russia to be born. What was
heaving into view, in short, was not a possible beginning but the end.
Gray/A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South FinalProof 9.3.2004 11:11am page 3
The imagination of disaster that Tate and Bishop shared in their correspondence
and elsewhere – sometimes with a rather unseemly, lipsmacking relish – is surely one
of the constants of Southern self-fashioning. So is their sense of aberration and
anomaly. Whatever else Southerners may have in common (and it is sometimes very
little), they have habitually defined themselves, as Tate and Bishop did, against a
national or international ‘‘other.’’ A familiar set of oppositions performs important
cultural work here: ‘‘Southern’’ vs. ‘‘American’’/‘‘Northern’’/‘‘Western’’ (the slippage
between these three terms is, in itself, a measure of the Southern sense of deviation
from a ‘‘norm’’) ¼ place vs. placelessness ¼ past vs. pastlessness ¼ realism vs. idealism¼ mournful, deeply felt endings vs. millennial, vaguely fancied beginnings. In thiscontext, ‘‘South’’ and ‘‘North’’ end up functioning rather like a photograph and its
negative, in a mutually determining, reciprocally defining relationship: the South is,
in these circumstances, whatever the North is not and vice versa. It may be that all
cultures do this, in order to define themselves. The difference with the Southern
strategy is that it customarily begins from a consciousness of its own marginality and
even ‘‘failure,’’ its position on the edge of the narrative. The constitutive otherness of
the North or the American is considered central; the South, in whatever terms it is
understood, is placed on the boundary, posed as a (albeit probably preferable)
deviation. This is a poignant reversal of the usual strategies of cultural self-position-
ing. It would never have occurred to those who constructed the idea of the Orient, for
example, to see their object of study as anything other than inferior to the enlightened
West and on the dangerous borders of Western culture. The lesser breed was famously
without the law. The idea of Southerness may or may not carry a moral burden. It may
project on to the typology of itself, and its opposite, a sense of its own superiority and
a claim to historical centrality of the kind Tate and Bishop both ventured – or of the
sort the South Carolina politician William Lowndes Yancey was imagining when he
declared:
The Creator has beautified the face of the Union with sectional features. Absorbing all
minor subdivisions, he has made the North and the South; the one the region of
frost . . . the other baring its generous bosom to the sun . . . Those who occupy the one
are cool, calculating, enterprising, selfish, and grasping; the inhabitants of the other are
ardent, brave, and magnanimous, more disposed to give than to accumulate, to enjoy
ease rather than to labor.3
Nevertheless, the claim cannot be made effortlessly, without a powerful sense of past
exclusion, present discontent, and future peril; Yancey was, after all, speaking as the
sectional crisis deepened towards war. Southerners start by seeing others with a more
than usually astringent sense of how others see them; their arguments begin, as it
were, within an argument already made that has shifted them on to the historical edge
– an edge from which, quite possibly, they are about to fall off.
A word of caution is perhaps useful. These acts of regional self-definition made in
the face of crisis are not, of course, simply fake. It is not that the South and the North
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4 Part I Introduction
or the American nation – even in the crudely simplistic terms imagined by Yancey –
are merely falsehoods, fables, no more in touch with historical contingencies than, say,
stories of the lost city of Atlantis. They are, however, fictive – and in a double sense.
They are fictive, first, because they involve a reading of existence as essence. What
Anwar Abdel Malek has to say about Orientalism is relevant here. Orientalists, he
points out, ‘‘adopt an essentialist conception of the countries, nations, and peoples of
the Orient under study, a conception which expresses itself through a characterized
ethnist typology.’’4 In short, they form a notion of a cultural ‘‘type’’ based on a real
specificity but divorced from history. Similarly, the cultural work that has devised
ideas of the South and Southerners, and their opposites, occurs in history, and is a
result of the forces working in the field of historical evolution. But its end result is to
transfix the beings, the objects of study and leave them stamped with an inalienable,
non-evolutive character – to sever them from the living tissue of their moment in
time. These constructions of regional types are also fictional in the sense that perhaps
Yancey had at the back of his mind when he conveniently skipped over what he called
‘‘all minor subdivisions.’’ The South has never not been made up of a number of castes,
classes, and smaller communities that at best live in uneasy coexistence with each
other and at worst are in active conflict – and some of which, at least, choose to claim
that their South is the South, their story the master narrative of the region. Readings of
the South are just that, readings; for better or worse, they involve selection and
abstraction, a figuring and, in the purest sense of that word, a simplifying of history.
‘‘Communities are to be distinguished,’’ argues the historian Benedict Anderson,
‘‘not by their falsity/genuineness, but the style in which they are imagined.’’5 And
that ‘‘style,’’ the terms in which an imagined community is imagined, has met with a
peculiar series of challenges in the recent South – as the familiar sense of being
peripheral and in peril has been exacerbated, for contemporary Southerners, by radical
changes to both the material substance and the moral shape of their lives. As far as the
economic imperatives are concerned, Southerners are now exposed to the demands of
the marketplace – for good or (as Tate and Bishop would surely have seen it) for ill.
With the collapse of the plantation system, the dispersal of the mill villages, and the
breakdown of other places of settled employment, white males in particular have felt
this exposure – but white women and African Americans have felt it too, as they have
become more visible elements in the economy. The women’s movement, together
with the crumbling of traditional structures, has opened up female access to the
marketplace. And the civil rights movement, together with subsequent federal
legislation, has allowed blacks to become a more active and fluid, if still significantly
disadvantaged, part of the labor force. The result is that the Southern workforce is
now just over one-third white female, just under 10 percent black male, and just
under 10 percent black female. In the words of one historian, Numan Bartley,
summing up the changes of the recent past, in 1995:
A dynamic free-flowing workforce unburdened by labor union membership, unity, or
much in the way of state protection or social legislation complemented the drive for
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Writing Southern Cultures 5
economic growth while it undermined family, community, and the spiritual aspects of
religion.6
Another historian described this transfer to the market economy, and commodifica-
tion, of most of the adult population of the South much more succinctly; the South,
he said, was now ‘‘a conservative capitalist’s dream come true.’’
‘‘Southerners feel,’’ the social scientist Charles Lerche observed in 1964, ‘‘that they
are struggling against an open conspiracy and a totally hostile environment.’’ A similar
point was made by another commentator, Sheldon Hackney, five years later: ‘‘the
Southern identity,’’ he observed, ‘‘has been linked from the first to a siege mentality’’ –
and continued to be. Comments like these, made usually but not always about white
Southerners, suggest that forms of Southern self-fashioning founded on resistance,
aberration, and deliberate anachronism continue to flourish, even in a world of surfeit.
This was a point made, in more detail, by the sociologist John Shelton Reed, when he
came to write a concluding note to a new edition of his survey of Southern attitudes,
The Enduring South. Reed found, he said, powerful feelings of being marginalized and
even threatened still at work among the – mostly white – Southerners surveyed. More
to the point, the data accumulated for this new edition only confirmed what he had
claimed when The Enduring South had first appeared fourteen years earlier. ‘‘Cultural
differences that were largely due to Southerners’ lower incomes and educational
levels,’’ Reed declared, ‘‘to their predominantly rural and small-town residence’’ and
‘‘to their concentration in agricultural and low-level industrial occupations’’: all these,
he said, ‘‘were smaller in the 1960s than they had been in the past, and they are
smaller still in the 1980s.’’ ‘‘A few’’ of these differences ‘‘have vanished altogether,’’ he
pointed out; and, as a result, ‘‘there are important respects in which Southerners look
more like other Americans, culturally, than they have at any time for decades, if
ever.’’7 On the other hand, those differences that Reed labeled ‘‘quasi-ethnic,’’ because
of their putative origins in the different histories of the American regions, had, many
of them, persisted. On the matters of localism, attitudes towards violence, gun
ownership, and religion, white Southerners still revealed themselves to be distinctive,
different.
In fact, if there appeared to be any significant change in mental maps between the
1960s and the 1980s, Reed commented, it was among non-Southerners. ‘‘Non-
Southerners are becoming more like Southerners,’’ Reed concluded, ‘‘in their tendency
to find heroes and heroines in their local community, or even in the family. . . the
conviction that individuals should have the right to arm themselves’’ and in their
tendency ‘‘to have had the sort of religious experience that is theoretically central to
Southern Protestantism.’’ What has been called ‘‘the Southernization of America,’’ by
the historian John Egerton among others, suggests that one response to commodifi-
cation, and the globalization of the material life, is resistance and even a kind of
cultural reversion. Americans, and not just Southerners, seem to have reacted to the
blanding of America, over the last two or three decades, by subscribing to cultural
values that simultaneously register their anxiety about change and measure their
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6 Part I Introduction
difference from the corporate ethos. ‘‘The ‘primitive’ attitudes that east-coast liberals
used to sneer at,’’ a 1994 article in The Economist proclaimed, ‘‘are now those of
America.’’ That is surely too sweeping, but it underlines the point that surrender to
the laws of the global village is not the only available option. On the contrary,
Southerners have always shown how one viable response to feelings of being margin-
alized is to build on the margins, to root one’s thinking precisely in the sense of being
disempowered and different; and some non-Southerners, at least, appear to be imitat-
ing them. John Shelton Reed put it more wryly. ‘‘I do not want to suggest that
Americans are becoming privatistic, born-again gun-slingers,’’ he declared, ‘‘or that
Southerners are.’’ Nevertheless, he added, ‘‘perhaps there is a pattern here’’:8 a pattern
of convergence, that is, quite different from the one that anticipated an economically
resurgent South simply becoming more like the rest of America.
Even a phrase like ‘‘the Southernization of America’’ is too simple, however, and, in
the end, no more satisfactory than ‘‘the Americanization of the South.’’ In its own way,
it prescribes a model for understanding recent social change in the region that is just
as monolithic and disablingly unitary as other terms that have become part of the
currency of this debate: terms or phrases like, say, ‘‘the lasting South,’’ ‘‘the everlasting
South,’’ ‘‘why the South will survive’’ – or, alternatively, ‘‘this changing South,’’ ‘‘an
epitaph for Dixie,’’ ‘‘look away from Dixie.’’ Non-Southerners have certainly gravi-
tated towards Southern thinking in many respects. They range from the anonymous
people surveyed in The Enduring South or the millions of non-Southern voters involved
in what political scientists have called ‘‘an issue-driven switch’’ to the Republican
Party, to a distinguished historian from the political left, Eugene Genovese, who then
turned to the tradition of Southern conservatism as the only serious challenge – with
the collapse of communism – to what he called ‘‘market-oriented bourgeois ideolo-
gies.’’9 But several further twists are given to an already tangled situation by two
other factors: the selling of the South, as a kind of giant theme park or American
version of the heritage industry, and our greatly enlarged sense of the pluralism of any
culture, including the Southern one. As for the selling of the region: in Oral History
(1983) by Lee Smith, the old family homeplace still stands, but it has become an
appropriately decaying part of a successful theme park called Ghostland. In the state
of Mississippi, observes the central character in Hey Jack! (1987) by Barry Hannah,
‘‘I find there are exactly five subjects: money, Negroes, women, religion, and Elvis
Presley. The rest are nothing.’’10 And, as if to prove the truth of this observation, it is
possible to go to Memphis, not far from where Hannah lives, and find ‘‘Negroes,
women, religion, and Elvis Presley’’ all being turned into ‘‘money.’’ Jostling close to
each other are such signs of the times, and the new Southern tourism, as Presley’s
Graceland with its nine gift shops – or Beale Street reconstituted as a heritage site
with the W. C. Handy statue, restaurants and shops selling African-American
memorabilia, and the Center for Southern Folklore.
‘‘This is America, where money’s more serious than death.’’11 Harry Crews’s
sardonic comment alerts us to a problem. There are no doubt noble motives at
work in the construction of Southern tourist sites, among them the desire to make
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Writing Southern Cultures 7
the past more accessible. But a tourist site is, pretty obviously, a way of making
money and generating trade for the area; it belongs as much to the culture of
consumerism as, say, a shopping mall. This is a very particular kind of commodifica-
tion that turns the South itself – or, to be more exact, an idea or image of the South –
into a product, a function of the marketplace. Like all good products, it has a clear
identity. As movies such as Driving Miss Daisy, Doc Hollywood, and O Brother, Where
Art Thou?, or advertisements for Jack Daniel’s whiskey, tell us, the South is registered
in popular perception and marketed as a desirable other, one potential, purchasable
release from the pressures of living and working in a world governed by the new
technologies and international capital. History is thereby displaced into aesthetic
style. Via cultural work that Adorno called ‘‘receding concreteness,’’ any possibility of
a lived encounter with the past slips away, and we are left with a marketable artifact, a
copy. What appears to be a process of remembering turns out, in the end, to be one of
forgetting, since the realities of economic change, structural transformation, are
masked, for the purposes of making a sale, by an image of cultural continuity. The
ironies of Southern history have always run deep, and surely one of the deepest in
recent times is this curious case of change within continuity within change. Some
aspects of the South retain their grip on the imagination despite the economic
metamorphosis of the region, but then that drift towards the past, the undertow of
resistance itself becomes a saleable asset. The legends of the South are not necessarily
dying, in other words, nor being fiercely protected or even resurrected; in some cases,
they are merely being turned into cash.
The responses of Southerners themselves to this particular irony are perhaps worth
measuring. After all, they are consumers too, and can be included among those to
whom the South is being sold. One measurable reaction is resistance. ‘‘I wasn’t into
jazz as a kid’’ in New Orleans, the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis told the British
Broadcasting Corporation in 1993, ‘‘I thought it was just shakin’ your butt for the
white tourists in the French Quarter.’’ And, given that the director of the New
Orleans tourist board once boasted, ‘‘Music is integral to our marketing plan,’’12
Marsalis’s initial reluctance to become involved in a music to which he was so
obviously suited seems understandable. Another reaction, its opposite, is to buy
into the Southern performance of the good life. That buying ranges from the huge
commercial growth of country music or what has become known as ‘‘Southern rock,’’
in the United States generally but especially in the South, to a publishing phenom-
enon like Southern Living. Initiated as a magazine in 1966, out of a column that had
run for many years in Progressive Farmer, Southern Living reinforces and defends an
image of the region as a place of downhome securities, safe harbor for all those for
whom, in the words of one commentator, ‘‘the South is distinct, is special, perhaps
even chosen.’’ With its articles on such traditionally Southern obsessions as hunting
and fishing, entertaining and etiquette, tasteful decorating and dining, it offers a
fantasy conduct manual – a guide to behaving well in a blessed, glossy landscape of
gracious homes, immaculate furniture, and manicured lawns. The president of the
company that began Southern Living said in 1985 that his company’s mission was ‘‘to
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8 Part I Introduction
give people in the South a sense of pride in being Southern.’’ This the magazine does
by offering to its readers’ gaze the promissory image of a place free of social anxiety or
economic insecurity, in which the greatest problem becomes how to choose the right
pattern for the silverware. The elusive object of desire here, to be claimed at the point
of purchase, is the image of ‘‘Southern living’’ itself: what one analyst of the journal
has called its construction of
a South without memory of pellagra or racial unrest, a South where none of the parents
are divorced, where burglary and street crime are unknown, where few have Hatteras
yachts but one and all play golf and tennis at the club – and in the right outfits.13
Issues of class and race appear only in subtly coded, disguised form – in, say, articles
about black college football players; the project is to reassure the mainly white, middle-
class, Southern consumer by offering him (or, more often in this case, her) a familiar
regional version of the culturally counterfeit – a copy of a world of easy but mannerly
living for which, it turns out, there has never been an original. That project has been
remarkably successful. By the middle of the 1990s, Southern Living could boast nearly
two-and-a-half million subscribers; of these, over 80 percent had well-above average
incomes and, more to the point, over 80 percent of them also lived in the South.
Another, more complicated reaction to the selling of the South is described in The
Revolution of Little Girls (1991) by Blanche McCrary Boyd. The novel charts the
growth of a young girl called Ellen Burns out of South Carolina and into womanhood,
feminism, and a discovery of her own lesbianism. What is of special interest here,
however, is one moment in her youth when, thanks to her workaholic father, the
Burns family move out of a modest house on the outskirts of Charleston into ‘‘an old
plantation out in the country’’ known as Blacklock. ‘‘I had never seen a house like the
one at Blacklock, except in the movies,’’ Ellen explains. ‘‘Each time Gone With the
Wind was rereleased, our family, minus my father, went dutifully to see this tribute to
what we had lost’’ – although the notion of loss is cultural rather than familial since,
as Ellen points out, ‘‘my father had grown up poor.’’ ‘‘We were minus my father,’’
Ellen adds, ‘‘because he was tied up making money. . . so we could do things like
move to Blacklock.’’ ‘‘When ‘Dixie’ played,’’ in the movie, she remembers, ‘‘I cried
every time.’’ ‘‘And when Scarlett O’Hara said, ‘As God is my witness, I’ll never be
hungry again,’ ’’ she adds, ‘‘I’d think, yeah, me [n]either.’’ Come the day the family move
to Blacklock, Ellen is struck by the fact that, although ‘‘it didn’t look like Tara,’’ it has
all the crucial paraphernalia of that Old South sold to an eager public in popular films
and fiction, including slave cabins, huge oak trees, ‘‘a set of white columns’’ at the
entrance to the estate, and ‘‘a white oyster-shell road that circled in front of the house
on top of the hill.’’ ‘‘I’ve seen this movie before,’’ Ellen shouts out as they approach the
house; and, although her father tells her to ‘‘Hush, Ellen,’’ she cries out again, ‘‘I’ve
seen this movie before!’’14
Ellen Burns comes across in Boyd’s novel as an edgy, sophisticated, often subversive
person; and her immediate response to the plantation heritage that her family has, in
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Writing Southern Cultures 9
effect, bought is characteristically subtle and self-conscious. With one, particularly
ironic eye she can see how she and her family have been sold a product, through
movies like Gone With the Wind. They have, she can appreciate, been taught what they
have ‘‘lost,’’ shown a gap in their lives that can supposedly be filled by the purchase of
Blacklock and other gracious appendages of ‘‘Southern living.’’ She can even perhaps
perceive the irony of gazing at a relic of the past in terms of mediated images of that
past, as if it were an imitation of an imitation, since in this world the authentic and
the replica become interchangeable as products, transferable commodities. Neverthe-
less, Ellen also looks at this site of desire with genuine excitement, even elation; the
fact that, as she sees it, she is moving close to a familiar movie set is an occasion for
delight as well as wry humor. She is, in short, not only amused but also pleased. She
soon comes to think of Blacklock as ‘‘cursed’’15 and is relieved when eventually, due to
a downturn in the family fortunes, the estate is sold – to a group that want to replicate
another image of traditional Southern living, by hunting wild duck in the rice
paddies. But that is only a further element in what Fredric Jameson would call the
logic of late capitalism: the climax is a matter of exchange, not of use. And it is a climax
that Ellen enjoys, for all her irony: she looks at Blacklock, when she arrives there, with
the gaze of the knowing consumer who desires no less because she understands the
crude mechanisms of consumerism – that her desires have been generated by the
marketplace. This self-aware, self-reflexive form of consumption is arguably the norm
now. When we watch films like Gone With the Wind or, say, Fried Green Tomatoes, we are
probably aware that we are looking at a counterfeit, a projection of our own culturally
formed desires on to a particular location in Southern space and time. Still, we receive
momentary satisfaction from it; we accept the counterfeit as if it were true currency. It
is in these curiously hybrid terms that many non-Southerners currently buy the image
of the South – just as Ellen Burns does when she arrives at ‘‘this movie’’ she has seen, she
says, many times before. And that perhaps is what most contemporary Southerners do
as well, including many of those subscribers to Southern Living.
All this, of course, begs the question of just what kind of South any of us may be
trying to renew, transform, preserve, or purchase. Is it the South, for instance, of
Wynton Marsalis or Blanche McCrary Boyd that is in the process of being sold? Or,
perhaps, the South enshrined in Southern Living? Is it the South of those predomin-
antly white Southerners for whom the Confederate flag is a proud emblem of regional
heritage? Or of those, both black and white, for whom that same flag is a symbol of
racial hatred? Questions like these have always hovered behind any attempt to chart
Southern thinking, but the drawing of the mental maps of the region has become
peculiarly challenging in the past few years with the growth of cultural pluralism.
Makers of the South and things Southern whose work previously tended to be ignored
or minimized, often for reasons of caste or gender or both, now come much more into
debate and play.16 They range from popular novelists like Margaret Mitchell, through
blues singers and jazz musicians, film directors and country songwriters, to those
numerous and frequently anonymous women and men who have resurrected and
reshaped the traditions of African art in the region. Just as much at issue here is
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10 Part I Introduction
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