A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955

by Richard H. King

Overview

Examining the interaction between literature and history, King shows how such writers as William Faulkner, James Agee, W. J. Cash, Allen Tate, and C. Vann Woodward confronted Southern traditions rooted in the plantation culture, the Civil War, Reconstruction and racial reaction and raised them to a historical awareness. In the process some of these figures rejected while others reaffirmed the essence of what King calls the "Southern family romance."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195030433
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	06/28/1991
Pages:	364
Product dimensions:	0.00(w) x 0.00(h) x 0.00(d)

Table of Contents

1	A Southern Renaissance	3
2	The Southern Family Romance and Its Context	20
3	Modernizers and Monumentalists: Social Thought in the 1930s	39
4	Repetition and Despairing Monumentalism: William Faulkner and Will Percy	77
5	Between Repetition and Recollection: Allen Tate and William Faulkner	99
6	Working Through: Faulkner's Go Down, Moses	130
7	Narcissus Grown Analytical: Cash's Southern Mind	146
8	From Therapy to Morality: The Example of Lillian Smith	173
9	From Theme to Setting: Thomas Wolfe, James Agee, Robert Penn Warren	194
10	The New Southern Liberalism: V. O. Key, C. Vann Woodward, Robert Penn Warren	242
	Conclusion	287
	Notes	295
	Index	335

Editorial Reviews

"A Southern Renaissance is a richer book than I can begin to convey. It is witty, learned and felt, with a relevance beyond the geographical borders of its subject."—Stephen J. Whitfield, The New Leader

"A book that henceforth every serious student of southern history and southern literature will have to take into account."—David Herbert Donald, The New Republic

From the Publisher