Southern United States literature

Southern literature is defined as 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 community's dominating religion and the burden religion often brings, issues of racial tension, land and the promise it brings, and the use of southern dialect.

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map of the American South, courtesy of the Southern Literary Review

Overview of Southern Literature

In its simpliest form, southern literature consists of writings about the American South, with the South either being defined as the Deep South states of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana or the extended South which includes the border states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, and Arkansas and the peripheral southern states of Florida and Texas.

In addition to the geographical component of southern literature, certain themes have appeared because of the similar histories of the southern states with 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, and community in one's personal and social life. 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 sometimes open to debate. 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 north as soon as they were old enough to break out on their own. So while geography is a factor, it is not the defining factor in southern writing.

History of Southern Literature

Up until about 1850, much of the literature about the South was written by people from outside the region. Of these writings, the most famous is Connecticut-native Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, an abolitionist novel focusing on the evils of slavery.

In response to Stowe's novel, southern writers produced a number of pro-slavery novels and books, such as the so-called plantation or anti-Tom novels by John Pendleton Kennedy, William Gilmore Simms, Caroline Lee Hentz, and others. Anti-Tom novels tended to feature a benign patriarchal master and a pure white wife who presided over child-like blacks in a benevolent extended-family-style plantation. To counter this type of fiction, a number of former slaves such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass wrote slave narratives, which painted a much harsher version of plantation life.

In the second half of the 19th century, the South lost the Civil War and suffered through what many southerners considered a harsh occupation (called Reconstruction). In place of the Anti-Tom literature came poetry and novels about the "Lost Cause" of the South's Civil War fight. Prominent writers who wrote from this point of view included poets Henry Timrod and Sidney Lanier and fiction writer Thomas Nelson Page. Others, like African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt, dismissed this nostalgia and instead pointed out the continuing racism and exploitation of blacks in the South.

In 1884, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, published what is arguably the most famous 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.

In the 1920s and '30s, the Southern Renaissance began with the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Because of these writers' distance from the Civil War and slavery, they were more objective about the South's racial and historic issues. 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 (such as in his novel As I Lay Dying).

From the 1950s 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 black writers began to be accepted as part of southern literature. Writers in this period include men such as Reynolds Price, James Dickey, Walker Percy, and Barry Hannah; African Americans such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Gaines and Dori Sanders; and women such as Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers. One of the most famous southern novels of the second half of the 20th century, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, won the Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1960.

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].

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 brilliantly written piece with absolutely none of the characteristics associated with "southern writing." Other southern writers, such as John Grisham, rarely write about traditional southern literary issues at all.

Among the prominent southern writers today are Pat Conroy, Fannie Flagg, Randall Kenan, Tom Wolfe, Wendell Berry, Cormac McCarthy, and Edward P. Jones.

External Articles About Southern Literature

Walter Percy and Southern Literature. Explores the overall issues surrounding what makes for southern literature.
Where is the South in Today's Southern Literature? Article exploring recent changes in southern literature.
The Dead Mule Rides Again Explanation of what constitutes "good" southern writing.

Southern Literary Journals

The Southern Review The famous literary journal focusing on southern literature.
Southern Cultures Journal from the Center for the Study of the American South
Southern Literary Review Book reviews, profiles of southern authors, and a directory of southern authors by state.
Southern Scribe News and reviews about southern literature (including a helpful calendar of pertinent events).
storySouth A journal of new writings from the American South. Features fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and more.
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.

References

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.
"Caroline Lee Hentz's Long Journey" by Philip D. Beidler. Alabama Heritage Number 75, Winter 2005.