Southern Renaissance
Encyclopedia
The Southern Renaissance (also known as Southern Renascence) was the reinvigoration of American
Southern literature
that began in the 1920s and 1930s with the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner
, Caroline Gordon
, Elizabeth Madox Roberts
, Katherine Anne Porter
, Allen Tate
, Tennessee Williams
, and Robert Penn Warren
, among others.
s about the "Lost Cause
" of the Confederate States of America
. This writing glorified the heroism of the Confederate army and civilian population during the Civil War
and the supposedly "idyllic culture" that existed in the South before the war (known as the Antebellum South).
The belief in the heroism and morality of the South's "Lost Cause" was a driving force in Southern literature
between the Civil War and World War I
. The Southern Renaissance
changed this by addressing three major themes in their works. The first was the burden of history in a place where many people still remembered slavery, Reconstruction, and a devastating military defeat. The second theme was to focus on the South's conservative
culture, specifically on how an individual could exist without losing a sense of identity in a region where family, religion, and community were more highly valued than one's personal and social life. The final theme that the renaissance writers approached was the South's troubled history in regards to racial issues. Because of these writers' distance from the Civil War and slavery, they were able to bring more objectivity to writings about the South. They also brought new modernistic techniques
such as stream of consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their works (as Faulkner did in his novel As I Lay Dying).
Among the writers of the Southern Renaissance, William Faulkner
is arguably the most influential and famous, having won the Nobel Prize in Literature
in 1949.
during which Southern literature was dominated by writers who supported the Lost Cause.
Yet the critical spirit that characterized the Southern Renaissance did have roots in the era that preceded it.
From the 1880s onwards, a few white Southern authors, such as George Washington Cable
and Mark Twain
(often considered a Southerner because he grew up in the slave state
of Missouri and wrote about the South) dismissed this nostalgia by pointing out the blatant racism and exploitation of blacks at that time, and ridiculing the notion of Southern "chivalry".
In the 1890s, the writings of journalist Walter Hines Page
and academics William Peterfield Trent
and John Spencer Bassett
severely criticized the cultural and intellectual mediocrity of the men who held power in the South. In 1903, Basset, an academic at Trinity College (later Duke University
) angered many influential white Southerners when he called African-American leader Booker T. Washington
"the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in a hundred years."
The most comprehensive and outspoken criticisms directed against the tenets of the "Lost Cause" before the First World War were put forth by African American writers
who grew up in the South, most famously by Charles W. Chesnutt
in his novels The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901). However, before the 1970s, African-American authors from the South were not considered part of Southern literature by the white and mostly male authors and critics who considered themselves the main creators and guardians of the Southern literary tradition.
The Southern Renaissance was the first mainstream movement within Southern literature to address the criticisms of Southern cultural and intellectual life that had emerged both from within the Southern literary tradition and from outsiders, most notably the satirist H.L. Mencken. In the 1920s Mencken led the attack on the genteel tradition in American literature, ridiculing the provinicialism of American intellectual life. In his 1920 essay "The Sahara of the Bozart" (a pun on a Southern pronunciation of 'beaux-arts') he singled out the South as the most provincial and intellectually barren region of the US, claiming that since the Civil War, intellectual and cultural life there had gone into terminal decline. This created a storm of protest from within conservative circles in the South. However, many emerging Southern writers who were already highly critical of contemporary life in the South were emboldened by Mencken's essay. On the other hand, Mencken's subsequent bitter attacks on aspects of Southern culture that they valued amazed and horrified them. In response to the attacks of Mencken and his imitators, Southern writers were provoked to a reassertion of Southern uniqueness and a deeper exploration of the theme of Southern identity.
in Nashville
, Tennessee
, just after the First World War. The group included John Crowe Ransom
, Donald Davidson
, Allen Tate
, Robert Penn Warren
, and others. Together they created the magazine The Fugitive (1922–1925), so named because the editors announced that they fled "from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South."
.
, James Dickey
, Walker Percy
, Eudora Welty
, Flannery O'Connor
, Carson McCullers
, and Harper Lee
(whose novel To Kill a Mockingbird
won the Pulitzer Prize
in 1961), along with many others.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
Southern literature
Southern literature
Southern literature is defined as American literature about the Southern United States or by writers from this region...
that began in the 1920s and 1930s with the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, Caroline Gordon
Caroline Gordon
Caroline Ferguson Gordon was a notable American novelist and literary critic who, while still in her thirties, was the recipient of two prestigious literary awards, a 1932 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1934 O...
, Elizabeth Madox Roberts
Elizabeth Madox Roberts
Elizabeth Madox Roberts was a Kentucky novelist and poet, primarily known for her novels and stories about the Kentucky mountain people, including The Time of Man , The Great Meadow and A Buried Treasure . All of her writings are characterized by her distinct, rhythmic prose...
, Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim...
, Allen Tate
Allen Tate
John Orley Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.-Life:...
, Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
, and Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
, among others.
Overview
Prior to this renaissance, Southern writers tended to focus on historical romanceHistorical romance
Historical romance is a subgenre of two literary genres, the romance novel and the historical novel.-Definition:Historical romance is set before World War II...
s about the "Lost Cause
Lost Cause of the Confederacy
The Lost Cause is the name commonly given to an American literary and intellectual movement that sought to reconcile the traditional white society of the U.S. South to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War of 1861–1865...
" of the Confederate States of America
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...
. This writing glorified the heroism of the Confederate army and civilian population during the Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
and the supposedly "idyllic culture" that existed in the South before the war (known as the Antebellum South).
The belief in the heroism and morality of the South's "Lost Cause" was a driving force in Southern literature
Southern literature
Southern literature is defined as American literature about the Southern United States or by writers from this region...
between the Civil War and World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. The Southern Renaissance
changed this by addressing three major themes in their works. The first was the burden of history in a place where many people still remembered slavery, Reconstruction, and a devastating military defeat. The second theme was to focus on the South's conservative
Conservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
culture, specifically on how an individual could exist without losing a sense of identity in a region where family, religion, and community were more highly valued than one's personal and social life. The final theme that the renaissance writers approached was the South's troubled history in regards to racial issues. Because of these writers' distance from the Civil War and slavery, they were able to bring more objectivity to writings about the South. They also brought new modernistic techniques
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
such as stream of consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their works (as Faulkner did in his novel As I Lay Dying).
Among the writers of the Southern Renaissance, William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
is arguably the most influential and famous, having won the Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
in 1949.
The emergence of a new critical spirit
The Southern Renaissance in the 1920s had been preceded by a long period after the Civil Warduring which Southern literature was dominated by writers who supported the Lost Cause.
Yet the critical spirit that characterized the Southern Renaissance did have roots in the era that preceded it.
From the 1880s onwards, a few white Southern authors, such as George Washington Cable
George Washington Cable
George Washington Cable was an American novelist notable for the realism of his portrayals of Creole life in his native Louisiana. His fiction has been thought to anticipate that of William Faulkner.- Biography:...
and Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
(often considered a Southerner because he grew up in the slave state
Slave state
In the United States of America prior to the American Civil War, a slave state was a U.S. state in which slavery was legal, whereas a free state was one in which slavery was either prohibited from its entry into the Union or eliminated over time...
of Missouri and wrote about the South) dismissed this nostalgia by pointing out the blatant racism and exploitation of blacks at that time, and ridiculing the notion of Southern "chivalry".
In the 1890s, the writings of journalist Walter Hines Page
Walter Hines Page
Walter Hines Page was an American journalist, publisher, and diplomat. He was the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom during World War I.-Biography:...
and academics William Peterfield Trent
William Peterfield Trent
William Peterfield Trent, LL.D., D.C.L. was a professor of English literature at Columbia University, an American editor, and a historian.-Biography:...
and John Spencer Bassett
John Spencer Bassett
John Spencer Bassett was an American historian. He was a professor at Duke University best known today for initiating the Bassett Affair in 1903.- Biography :...
severely criticized the cultural and intellectual mediocrity of the men who held power in the South. In 1903, Basset, an academic at Trinity College (later Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
) angered many influential white Southerners when he called African-American leader Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
"the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in a hundred years."
The most comprehensive and outspoken criticisms directed against the tenets of the "Lost Cause" before the First World War were put forth by African American writers
African American literature
African-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. The genre traces its origins to the works of such late 18th century writers as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, reaching early high points with slave narratives and the Harlem...
who grew up in the South, most famously by Charles W. Chesnutt
Charles W. Chesnutt
Charles Waddell Chesnutt was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South, where the legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free...
in his novels The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901). However, before the 1970s, African-American authors from the South were not considered part of Southern literature by the white and mostly male authors and critics who considered themselves the main creators and guardians of the Southern literary tradition.
The Southern Renaissance was the first mainstream movement within Southern literature to address the criticisms of Southern cultural and intellectual life that had emerged both from within the Southern literary tradition and from outsiders, most notably the satirist H.L. Mencken. In the 1920s Mencken led the attack on the genteel tradition in American literature, ridiculing the provinicialism of American intellectual life. In his 1920 essay "The Sahara of the Bozart" (a pun on a Southern pronunciation of 'beaux-arts') he singled out the South as the most provincial and intellectually barren region of the US, claiming that since the Civil War, intellectual and cultural life there had gone into terminal decline. This created a storm of protest from within conservative circles in the South. However, many emerging Southern writers who were already highly critical of contemporary life in the South were emboldened by Mencken's essay. On the other hand, Mencken's subsequent bitter attacks on aspects of Southern culture that they valued amazed and horrified them. In response to the attacks of Mencken and his imitators, Southern writers were provoked to a reassertion of Southern uniqueness and a deeper exploration of the theme of Southern identity.
The Fugitives
The start of the Southern Renaissance is often traced back to the activities of "The Fugitives", a group of poets and critics who were based at Vanderbilt UniversityVanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the...
in Nashville
Nashville, Tennessee
Nashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...
, Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
, just after the First World War. The group included John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom was an American poet, essayist, magazine editor, and professor.-Life:...
, Donald Davidson
Donald Davidson (poet)
Donald Grady Davidson was a U.S. poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author...
, Allen Tate
Allen Tate
John Orley Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.-Life:...
, Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
, and others. Together they created the magazine The Fugitive (1922–1925), so named because the editors announced that they fled "from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South."
The Southern Agrarians
The emergence of the Southern Renaissance as a literary and cultural movement has also been seen as a consequence of the opening up of the predominantly rural South to outside influences due to the industrial expansion that took place in the region during and after the First World War. Southern opposition to industrialization was expressed in the famous essay collection I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), written by authors and critics from the Southern Renaissance who came to be known as Southern AgrariansSouthern Agrarians
The Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a...
.
Legacy
Many Southern writers of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s were inspired by the writers of the Southern Renaissance, including Reynolds PriceReynolds Price
Reynolds Price was an American novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist and the James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University. Apart from English literature, Price had a lifelong interest in ancient languages and Biblical scholarship...
, James Dickey
James Dickey
James Lafayette Dickey was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966.-Early years:...
, Walker Percy
Walker Percy
Walker Percy was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962...
, Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published...
, Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...
, Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers was an American writer. She wrote novels, short stories, and two plays, as well as essays and some poetry. Her first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the South...
, and Harper Lee
Harper Lee
Nelle Harper Lee is an American author known for her 1960 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which deals with the issues of racism that were observed by the author as a child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama...
(whose novel To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was instantly successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American literature...
won the Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
in 1961), along with many others.