Southern literature - theory

 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, the geographical birth of the author is not the defining factor in Southern writing.  

In the 1920s and '30s, a renaissance in Southern literature began with the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. 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. 

In the late 1930s one of the most well-known Southern novels was published: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. The novel, published in 1937, quickly became a bestseller and was made into an equally famous movie. Southern literature became popular across genres; children's books like Ezekiel, published in 1937 by writers/illustrators like Elvira Garner, drew audiences outside the South.

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. 

William Faulkner (1897-1962) Born to an old southern family, William Harrison Faulkner was raised in Oxford, Mississippi, where he lived most of his life. Faulkner created an entire imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha County, mentioned in numerous novels, along with several families with interconnections extending back for generations. Yoknapatawpha County, with its capital, "Jefferson," is closely modelled on Oxford, Mississippi, and its surroundings. Faulkner re-creates the history of the land and the various races -- Indian, African-American, Euro-American, and various mixtures -- that have lived on it. Faulkner experimented with narrative chronology, different points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and illiterates). 

The best of Faulkner's novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), two modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to probe southern families under the stress of losing a family member; Light in August (1932), about complex and violent relations between a white woman and a black man; and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), perhaps his finest, about the rise of a self-made plantation owner and his tragic fall through racial prejudice and a failure to love. Faulkner's themes are Southern tradition, family, community, the land, history and the past, race, and the passions of ambition and love. He also created three novels focusing on the rise of a degenerate family, the Snopes clan: The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959).

Today the American South is undergoing several 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. 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.

An important voice in American literature, Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) wrote two novels and 31 short stories. She was a Southern writer in the vein of William Faulkner, often writing in a Southern Gothic style and employing regional settings and grotesque characters. However, she remarked, “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic” (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose 40). Her texts often take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters. She often uses foreshadowing, giving a reader an idea of what will happen far before it happens. Finally, she ends each work with a disturbing and ironic conclusion. 

Her two novels were Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). She also published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge, published posthumously in 1965. 

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