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: Protestantism) and the burdens/rewards religion often brings, issues of racial tension, land and the promise it brings, a sense of social class, and the use of the Southern dialect.

Overview of Southern Literature

In its simplest form, Southern literature consists of writing about the American South, with the South either being defined as the Deep South states of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana, or the extended South which includes the border states such as Kentucky, 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 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, 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 to the Northern U.S. as soon as they were old enough to make it on their own. So while geography is a factor, it is not the defining factor in Southern writing.

History of Southern Literature

Early and Antebellum Literature

During the 17th and 18th centuries, a number of writers either wrote about or were from the American South (such as Captain John Smith who wrote an account of his adventures in Virginia and his rescue by Pocahontas). However, this literature is not considered southern because it predates the formation of the United States.

The South as a distinct culture began to come into existence in the early 1800s when cotton cultivation, and the expanded enslavement of Africans as farm labor, began to take hold. During this pre-Civil War Antebellum time period, a vibrant literary community was found in Charleston, South Carolina, then one of the largest cities in America. The writers of this period, such as poet Paul Hamilton Hayne, tended to produce lyrical and sentimental works. One noteworthy novel of this time, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, was written in 1853 by a southern-born slave named William Wells Brown. This novel, based on what at that time were considered rumors about Thomas Jefferson fathering a daughter with his slave Sally Hemings, was the first novel written by an African American.

Another successful writer to come out of the American south was Professor William_H._Peck. Born in 1830 in Augusta, Georgia he moved with his father Colonel Peck in 1843 to the Indian River Coloney in Central Florida. He later wrote descriptively about this area and his meeting with early pioneers such as lighthouse keeper Burnham of Cape Canaveral in the Florida Star Newspaper in 1887. He graduated from Harvard in 1853 and his writing career took off with submissions to Richard Bonner's New York Ledger. William Peck served as Professor of History at LSU and later moved to Atlanta, Georgia where he started "The Georgia Weekly". He later retired to the home of his youth in Merritt_Island, Florida and died soon after his wife in 1892 in Jacksonville Florida. A notable quote from his May Day ovation is "To the pure all things are pure".

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Anti-Tom Novels

In 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin was published, possibly the most famous novel ever written about the South. Authored by Connecticut-native Harriet Beecher Stowe, this abolitionist novel focused on the evils of slavery and became the best-selling novel of the century. The book was inspired by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act two years before, which punished those who aided runaway slaves. The book was highly controversial and fanned the debate over slavery in the country. When Abraham Lincoln met Stowe after the beginning of the Civil War, he reportedly said to her, "So you're the little lady whose book started this great war."

In response to Stowe's novel, Southern writers produced a number of pro-slavery books, including the so-called plantation or anti-Tom novels by John Pendleton Kennedy, William Gilmore Simms, Caroline Lee Hentz, and others.[1] Anti-Tom novels tended to feature a benign white patriarchal master and a pure wife, both of whom presided over child-like slaves 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.

The "Lost Cause" Years

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. These writers idealized the defeated South and its lost culture. Prominent writers with 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 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.

The 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, and Robert Penn Warren. 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. 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). "As I Lay Dying" is told by changing narrators ranging from the dead 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 1937, quickly became a bestseller and was made into an equally famous movie.

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, and Carson McCullers. Other well-known Southern writers of this period include Reynolds Price, James Dickey, 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 -- it 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 [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.

Among the prominent southern writers today are Barry Hannah, Pat Conroy, Fannie Flagg, Randall Kenan, Ernest Gaines, Tom Robbins, Tom Wolfe, Wendell Berry, Cormac McCarthy, Anne Rice, Edward P. Jones, Barbara Kingsolver, and Anne Tyler.

External links About Southern Literature

External Articles

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.
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.
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).

References

"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.