The Future of Southern Letters

by Jefferson Humphries, John Lowe

Overview

The New South—replete with shopping malls, hub airports, educated African Americans, and immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Haiti—is still haunted by the Gothic ghosts of its past. Does the collision between past and present account for the continued preeminence of Southern writers in America's literary culture? Bobbie Ann Mason, Ernest Gaines, Rita Mae Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Cormac McCarthy, Dorothy Allison, and Allan Gurganus are just a few of the writers who draw on a new kind of Southern background while reaching out to a broad American readership. Yet many of these writers have been accused of catering to the stereotypes they think a national audience requires. It would seem that questions of Southern identity continue to be bound up with rage against attacks on Southern culture.

Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe have assembled a remarkable team of scholars and writers to examine aspects of the contemporary literature of the South. From Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Fred Hobson to esteemed scholar James Olney to poets Kate Daniels and Brenda Marie Osbey, the contributors try to define Southern culture today and ask who will be writing Southern literature tomorrow. Addressing topics such as humor, the past, black autobiography, ethnicity, and female oral traditions, the essays form a volume that is of interest to readers of Southern literature and history, creative writers, and scholars and students of Southern culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195097818
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/08/1996
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.31(w) x 9.44(h) x 0.74(d)
Lexile:	1380L (what's this?)

About the Author

Jefferson Humphries is Professor of French, English, and Comparative Literature at Lousisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Among his many publications, Dr. Humphries is the author of The Puritan and the Cynic: the Literary Moralist in America and France (OUP, 1987). John Lowe teaches Southern, African American, and ethnic literature and theory at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, where he is Professor of English. Currently, Dr Lowe is Senior Fulbright Professor for 1995-96 at the Amerika-Institut in Munich.

Table of Contents

	Contributors	IX
	Introduction	3
1.	Southern Writing and the Problem of the Father	20
2.	Still Southern after All These Years	33
3.	Writing on the Cusp: Double Alterity and Minority Discourse in Appalachia	41
4.	The Shape of Appalachian Literature to Come: An Interview with Wil Hickson	54
5.	Porch-Sitting and Southern Poetry	61
6.	Of Canons and Cultural Wars: Southern Literature and Literary Scholarship after Midcentury	72
7.	... And Ladies of the Club	87
8.	An Interview with Brenda Marie Osbey	93
9.	The Discourse of Southernness: Or How We Can Know There Will Be Such a Thing as the South and Southern Literary Culture in the Twenty-First Century	119
10.	Autobiographical Traditions Black and White	134
11.	Speculations on a Southern Snipe	143
12.	Robert Olen Butler: A Pulitzer Profile	155
13.	The Rhetoric of Southern Humor	170
	Index	187

Editorial Reviews

"Highly recommended for all academic libraries."—Choice

From the Publisher