Southern United States literature

Early and antebellum literature

During the 17th and 18th centuries, English colonists in the Southern part of the American colonies produced a number of notable works. Two of the most famous were early memoirs of Virginia: Captain John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in the 1610s and 1620s, and William Byrd II's secret plantation diary, kept in the early 18th century. Both sets of recollections are critical documents in early Southern history.

After American independence, in the early 19th century, the expansion of cotton planting and slavery began to distinguish Southern society and culture more clearly from the rest of the young republic. During this antebellum period, South Carolina, and particularly the city of Charleston, rivaled and perhaps surpassed Virginia as a literary community. Writing in Charleston, the lawyer and essayist Hugh Swinton Legare, the poets Paul Hamilton Hayne and Henry Timrod, and the novelist William Gilmore Simms composed some of the most important works in antebellum Southern literature.

Simms was a particularly significant figure, perhaps the most prominent Southern author before the American Civil War. His novels of frontier life and the American revolution celebrated the history of South Carolina. Like James Fenimore Cooper, Simms was strongly influenced by Walter Scott, and his works bore the imprint of Scott's heroic romanticism. In The Yemassee, The Kinsmen, and the anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novel The Sword and the Distaff, Simms presented idealized portraits of slavery and Southern life. While popular and well regarded in South Carolina—and highly praised by such critics as Edgar Allan Poe—Simms never gained a large national audience.

In Virginia, George Tucker produced in 1824 the first fiction of Virginia colonial life with The Valley of Shenandoah. He followed in 1827 with one of the country's first science fictions, A Voyage to the Moon: With Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians. Tucker was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Virginia. In 1836 Tucker published the first comprehensive biography of Thomas Jefferson - The Life of Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States.^[10] Some critics also regard Poe as a Southern author—he was raised in Richmond, attended the University of Virginia, and edited the Southern Literary Messenger from 1835 to 1837. Yet in his poetry and fiction Poe rarely took up distinctively Southern themes or subjects; his status as a "Southern" writer remains ambiguous.

In the Chesapeake region, meanwhile, antebellum authors of enduring interest include John Pendleton Kennedy, whose novel Swallow Barn offered a colorful sketch of Virginia plantation life; and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, whose 1836 work The Partisan Leader foretold the secession of the Southern states, and imagined a guerrilla war in Virginia between federal and secessionist armies.

Not all noteworthy Southern authors during this period were white. Frederick Douglass's Narrative is perhaps the most famous first-person account of black slavery in the antebellum South. Harriet Jacobs, meanwhile, recounted her experiences in bondage in North Carolina in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. And another Southern-born ex-slave, William Wells Brown, wrote Clotel; or, The President's Daughter—widely believed to be the first novel ever published by an African-American. The book depicts the life of its title character, a daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his black mistress, and her struggles under slavery.

The "Lost Cause" years

In the second half of the 19th century, the South lost the Civil War and suffered through what many white Southerners considered a harsh occupation (called Reconstruction). In place of the anti-Tom literature came poetry and novels about the "Lost Cause of the Confederacy." This nostalgic literature began to appear almost immediately after the war ended; The Conquered Banner was published on June 24, 1865. These writers idealized the defeated South and its lost culture. Prominent writers with this point of view included poets Henry Timrod, Daniel B. Lucas, and Abram Joseph Ryan 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 1856 George Tucker completed his final multivolume work in his History of the United States, From Their Colonization to the End of the 26th Congress, in 1841.

In 1884, 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.

Kate Chopin was another central figure in post-Civil War Southern literature. Focusing her writing largely on the Acadian/Cajun communities of Louisiana, Chopin established her literary reputation with the short story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). These stories offered not only a sociological portrait of a specific Southern culture but also furthered the legacy of the American short story as a uniquely vital and complex narrative genre. But it was with the publication of her second and final novel The Awakening (1899) that she gained notoriety of a different sort. The novel not only shocked audiences with its frank and unsentimental portrayal of female sexuality and psychology. It paved the way for the Southern novel as both a serious genre (based in the realism that had dominated the western novel since Balzac) and one that tackled the complex and untidy emotional lives of its characters. Today she is widely regarded as not only one of the most important female writers in American literature, but one of the most important chroniclers of the post-Civil War South and one of the first writers to treat the female experience with complexity and without condescension.

During the first half of the 20th century, the lawyer, politician, minister, orator, actor, and author Thomas Dixon, Jr. wrote a number of novels, plays, sermons, and non-fiction pieces which were quite popular with the general public all over the USA. Today Dixon is perhaps best known for writing a trilogy of novels about Reconstruction, one of which was entitled The Clansman (1905), a book which would eventually become the inspiration for D. W. Griffith's infamous 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Overall Dixon wrote 22 novels, numerous plays and film scripts,^[11] Christian sermons, and some non-fiction works during his lifetime.

The Southern Renaissance

In the 1920s and 1930s, a renaissance in Southern literature began with the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, and Tennessee Williams, among others. 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. During the 1920s, Southern poetry thrived under the Vanderbilt "Fugitives". In nonfiction, H.L. Mencken's popularity increased nationwide as he shocked and astounded readers with his satiric writing highlighting the inability of the South to produce anything of cultural value. In reaction to Mencken's essay, "The Sahara of the Bozart," the Southern Agrarians (also based mostly around Vanderbilt) called for a return to the South's agrarian past and bemoaned the rise of Southern industrialism and urbanization. They noted that creativity and industrialism were not compatible and desired the return to a lifestyle that would afford the Southerner leisure (a quality the Agrarians most felt conducive to creativity). 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. For instance, his novel As I Lay Dying is told by changing narrators ranging from the deceased Addie to her young son.

The late 1930s also saw the publication of one of the best-known Southern novels, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. The novel, published in 1936, quickly became a bestseller. It won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize, and in 1939 an equally famous movie of the novel premiered. Mitchell's novel consolidated white supremacist Lost Cause ideologies (see Lost Cause of the Confederacy) to construct a bucolic plantation South in which slavery was a benign, or even benevolent, institution. She presents white southerners as victims of a rapacious Northern industrial capitalism and depicts black southerners as either lazy, stupid, and over sexualized, or as docile, childlike, and resolutely loyal to their white masters. Southern literature has always drawn audiences outside the South and outside the United States, and Gone with the Wind has continued to popularize harmful stereotypes of southern history and culture for audiences around the world^[12]

Post World War II Southern literature

Southern literature following the Second World War grew thematically as it embraced the social and cultural changes in the South resulting from the 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 and Sterling Allen Brown, along with women such as Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Ellen Glasgow, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, and Shirley Ann Grau, among many others. Other well-known Southern writers of this period include Reynolds Price, James Dickey, William Price Fox, Davis Grubb, Walker Percy, and William Styron. 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. New Orleans native and Harper Lee's friend, Truman Capote also found great success in the middle 20th century with Breakfast at Tiffany's and later In Cold Blood. 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 poetry bloomed in the decades following the Second World War in large part thanks to the writing and efforts of Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey. Where earlier work primarily championed a white, agrarian past, the efforts of such poets as Dave Smith, Charles Wright, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jim Seay, Frank Stanford, Kate Daniels, James Applewhite, Betty Adcock and Rodney Jones have opened up the subject matter and form of Southern poetry.^[13]

published in 20th c.

• Edwin Anderson Alderman; Joel Chandler Harris; Charles William Kent (eds.). Library of Southern Literature. Atlanta: Martin and Hoyt Company – via HathiTrust. 1909-1913 (16 volumes)
• Montrose Jonas Moses (1910). Literature of the South. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.
• Beatty, Richmond C.; Watkins, Floyd C.; Young, Thomas Daniel, eds. (1952). The Literature of the South. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company.
• Edd Winfield Parks. Ante-Bellum Southern Literary Critics. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1962
• Marion Montgomery, "The Sense of Violation: Notes toward a Definition of 'Southern' Fiction," The Georgia Review, 19 (1965)
• Holman, C. Hugh (1966). Three Modes of Modern Southern Fiction: Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. OCLC 859825215.
• Holman, C. Hugh; Rubin, Louis D., Jr.; Sullivan, Walter (1969). Southern Fiction: Renaissance and Beyond. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. OCLC 489993640.
• Flannery O'Connor, "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," in Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1969)
• Davis, Richard Beale; Holman, C. Hugh; Rubin, Louis D., Jr. (1970). Southern Writing, 1585-1920. New York: Odyssey Press. OCLC 907422022.
• Holman, C. Hugh (1972). The Roots of Southern Writing. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. ISBN 9780820302904.
• Holman, C. Hugh; Rubin, Louis D., Jr. (1975). Southern Literary Study: Promise and Possibilities.
• Holman, C. Hugh (1977). The Immoderate Past: The Southern Writer and History.
• Michael O'Brien (1979). The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0801840173
• Charles Reagan Wilson; William Ferris, eds. (1989). Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807818232. . Fulltext articles via the university's "Documenting the American South" website:
  • Beginnings of Southern Literature, Antebellum Era, Autobiography, Biography, Black Literature, Civil War in Literature, Folklore in Literature, Humor in Literature, Local Color Era, Regionalism and Local Color, Travel Writing
• The History of Southern Literature by Louis Rubin. Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
• Louis D. Rubin Jr., "From Combray to Ithaca; or, The 'Southernness' of Southern Literature," in The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree (Louisiana State University Press, 1991)
• Veronica Makowsky (1996), Walker Percy and Southern Literature (Explores the overall issues surrounding what makes for southern literature)
• Michael Kreyling (1998). Inventing Southern Literature. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-60473-776-9.
• Fred Hobson (1999). But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-4078-9.
• Ronald Lora; William Henry Longton, eds. (1999). "Southern Reviews, 1828-1880". Conservative Press in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-century America. Greenwood. pp. 147–282. ISBN 978-0-313-31043-0.
• Ernest Suarez (1999). Southbound: Interviews with Southern Poets. University of Missouri Press. ISBN 978-0-8262-6168-7.
• Richard J. Gray (2000). Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problem of Regionalism. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-2552-6.
• Jerry Leath Mills (2000). "The Dead Mule Rides Again". Southern Culture. 6.4. . (Explanation of what constitutes "good" southern writing)
• Patricia Yeager (2000). Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226944913.

published in 21st c.

• Houston A. Baker (2001). Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822326953.
• Joseph M. Flora; Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, eds. (2001). Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-2692-9.
• Where is the South in Today's Southern Literature? Article exploring 2002 changes in southern literature.
• 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.
• Carolyn Perry; Mary Louise Weaks, eds. (2002). History of Southern Women's Literature. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-2753-7.
• Suzanne W. Jones; Sharon Monteith, eds. (2002). South to A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Southern Literary Studies. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-2840-4.
• Tara McPherson (2003). Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822330400.
• "Genres of Southern Literature" by Lucinda MacKethan. Southern Spaces, Feb. 2004.
• Jon Smith; Deborah Cohn, eds. (2004). Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822333166.
• Leigh Anne Duck (2006). The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820334189.
• Riché Richardson (2007). Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820328904.
• Anderson, Eric Gary. "On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession" Southern Spaces. August 9, 2007.
• Leigh Anne Duck (July 2008). "Southern Nonidentity." Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 9 (3): 319-330.
• Harilaos Stecopoulos (2008). Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0801475023.
• M. Thomas Inge, ed. (2008). Literature. New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. 9. University of North Carolina Press. OCLC 910189354.
• Jennifer Rae Greeson (2010). Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674024281.
• Thadious M. Davis (2011). Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0807835210.
• Deborah Barker; Kathryn McKee, eds. (2011). American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820337104.
• Jonathan Daniel Wells (2011). Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-50349-5.
• Melanie Benson Taylor (2012). Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820338842.
• Jay Watson (2012). Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820343389.
• Richard Gray (2012). "Regionalism in the South". A History of American Literature (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4443-4568-1.
• Keith Cartwright (2013). Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways: Travels in Deep Southern Time, Circum-Caribbean Space, Afro-Creole Authority. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820345994.
• Matthew Pratt Guterl (2013). American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674072282.
• Claudia Milian (2013). Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820344362.
• Jon Smith (2013). Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820345260.
• Jason Phillips, ed. (2013). Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-5035-1.
• David A. Davis; Tara Powell, eds. (2014). Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-62674-210-9.
• Scott Romine (2014). The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0807156384.
• Eric Gary Anderson; Taylor Hagood; Daniel Cross Turner, eds. (2015). Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0807161074.
• Martyn Bone; Brian Ward; William A. Link, eds. (2015). Creating and Consuming the American South. University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0813060699.
• Fred Hobson; Barbara Ladd, eds. (2016). Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-049394-3.
• Susan Castillo Street; Charles L. Crow, eds. (2016). Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic. Springer. ISBN 978-1-137-47774-3.
• Jennifer Rae Greeson; Scott Romine, eds. (2016). Keywords for Southern Studies. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0820349626.