The U.S. South has always been a region in the process of constructing itself and being constructed by others, and has produced a rich body of literature that has variously imagined it as a place of great contrast with other areas of the United States and the Americas more generally. This course will consider the South though autobiography, short stories, poetry, drama and novels: from the Edenic visions of early diarists and correspondents, to the debates over slavery and secession leading up to the Civil War of 1861-5; from work by major writers such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner, to recent fiction by Robert Olen Butler and Lee Smith. We will discuss the processes of self-fashioning involved in Southern writing and culture, as well as various ways in which such models are problematised: for instance, through African-American perspectives, through aberrant places within the South such as New Orleans, and through recent critical moves to consider the region in wider hemispheric terms, away from strictly U.S.-oriented identities.
Early sessions will discuss various types of writing from foundational periods in Southern identity, before moving on to Twain's critical re-evaluations of the region and its codes. Cable's work also provides sharp critique, focusing on a somewhat anomalous Southern place, New Orleans. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African-American folktales, sketches, and songs demonstrate modes of resistance to the horrors of slavery and white oppression, these 'folk' materials further rendered and developed by Hurston in her underrated first novel. Four novels by Faulkner, arguably the greatest of Southern writers and one of the key figures of literary modernism, form the centrepiece of the course, and are followed by work by Williams, Welty, and O'Connor, writers of similarly major stature who variously capture elements of Southern life at once emblematic and idiosyncratic. We end with more recent work: Smith's novel and Butler's collection of stories portray the often overlooked Southern experiences of, respectively, Appalachian and Vietnamese-American communities, while Gaines and Gurganus's novels are fictional retellings and reconsiderations of seminal Southern tropes, telling the tales of women, one black, one white, who have lived through the South's traumas from the Civil War through to Civil Rights and beyond.
Early sessions will discuss various types of writing from foundational periods in Southern identity, before moving on to Twain's critical re-evaluations of the region and its codes. Cable's work also provides sharp critique, focusing on a somewhat anomalous Southern place, New Orleans. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African-American folktales, sketches, and songs demonstrate modes of resistance to the horrors of slavery and white oppression, these 'folk' materials further rendered and developed by Hurston in her underrated first novel. Four novels by Faulkner, arguably the greatest of Southern writers and one of the key figures of literary modernism, form the centrepiece of the course, and are followed by work by Williams, Welty, and O'Connor, writers of similarly major stature who variously capture elements of Southern life at once emblematic and idiosyncratic. We end with more recent work: Smith's novel and Butler's collection of stories portray the often overlooked Southern experiences of, respectively, Appalachian and Vietnamese-American communities, while Gaines and Gurganus's novels are fictional retellings and reconsiderations of seminal Southern tropes, telling the tales of women, one black, one white, who have lived through the South's traumas from the Civil War through to Civil Rights and beyond.