Inventing Southern Literature

431 Pages·1998·1.1 MB·English

by  Michael Kreyling

title: Inventing Southern Literature
author: Kreyling, Michael.
publisher: University Press of Mississippi
isbn10 | asin: 1578060451
print isbn13: 9781578060450
ebook isbn13: 9780585031873
language: English
American literature--Southern States--
History and criticism--Theory, etc,
American literature--Southern States--
subject History and criticism, Criticism--Southern
States--History--20th century, Southern
States--Intellectual life, Southern States--In
literature, G
publication date: 1998
lcc: PS261.K7 1998eb
ddc: 810.9/975
American literature--Southern States--
History and criticism--Theory, etc,
American literature--Southern States--
subject: History and criticism, Criticism--Southern
States--History--20th century, Southern
States--Intellectual life, Southern States--In
literature, G
Page iii
Inventing Southern
Literature
Michael Kreyling
University Press of Mississippi Jackson
Page iv
Parts of this book have appeared, in different versions, in Mississippi
Quarterly, The Southern Review, and The South as an American
Problem
(published by the University of Georgia Press). We thank the editors
for permission to use this material.
Copyright © 1998 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
01 00 99 98 4 3 2 1
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book
Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kreyling, Michael, 1948-
Inventing southern literature / Michael Kreyling.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57806-044-3 (cloth : alk. paper).ISBN 1-57806-045-1
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. American literatureSouthern StatesHistory and criticism
Theory, etc. 2. American literatureSouthern StatesHistory and
criticism. 3. CriticismSouthern StatesHistory century.
20th
4. Southern StatesIntellectual life. 5. Southern StatesIn
literature. 6. Group identity in literature. 7. Regionalism in
literature. I. Title.
PS261.K7 1998
810.9´975DC21 97-42139
CIP
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data available
Page v
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
I. The South of the Agrarians 3
II. Richard Weaver and the Outline of Southern Literary 19
History
III. Race, Literature, and History in the Work of Louis D. 33
Rubin, Jr.
IV. Southern Literature Anthologies and the Invention of the 56
South
V. African-American Writers and Southern Literary History 76
VI. Southern Women Writers and the Quentin Thesis 100
VII. Southern Writing under the Influence of William 126
Faulkner
VIII. Parody and Postsouthernness 148
IX. The Invention of the South and the Culture War 167
Works Cited 183
Index 195
Page vii
Acknowledgments
This book has been several years in the making, and along the way I
have counted upon the kindness of several people for advice and
simple attention while I literally talked out loud about a topic that
seemed all too often to make sense only to me.
Graduate and undergraduate students at Vanderbilt, and one class of
undergraduates at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, have been
subjected to this slant on southern literature. Their willingness to
agree and disagree has sustained my commitment to the project. As
long as it made sense to my students, I kept working.
Colleagues at meetings of the Society for the Study of Southern
Literature, the St. George Tucker Society, and the Southern
Intellectual History Circle have listened to versions of this work as it
evolvednot always in a clear and coherent direction. The good news is
that you will not have to listen any longer; you can read the book.
This, of course, goes double for my colleagues in the English and
history departments at Vanderbilt. Individual members of these
organizations have been especially helpful and tolerant: Richard King,
Susan Donaldson, Anne G. Jones.
Noel Polk read the manuscript voluntarily and gave me some much-
needed advice. Michael O'Brien has been interested in this work for at
least a decade, waiting for it to find its real trail. Throughout my work
I used O'Brien's as a standard, and I hope this lives up to it. Lewis P.
Simpson read and commented on parts of the project in its early
stages. His willingness to be costumed as an early postmodernist for
my argument is only one indication of his intellectual and professional
generosity and scope.
The people at the University Press of Mississippi have been incredibly
supportive. Joycelyn Trigg did copyediting that any author prays for.
Seetha Srinivasan, editor-in-chief, believed in this book when it

Page viii
was not much more than disconnected pieces and promises; I'm happy
that if it finally a tangible product of the University Press of
Mississippi.
Chris, my wife, a writer herself, robbed time from her own work to
read and critique this. In the low days when going on with it did not
seem to matter much, she showed why and how it should be done.
Nashville, Tennessee
August, 1997
Page ix
Introduction
Awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications
of continuity, yet of "forgetting" the experience of this continuity. engenders
the need for a narrative of "identity."
BENEDICT ANDERSON, Imagined Communities
Southern literaturean amalgam of literary history, interpretive
traditions, and a canonis a cultural product, or "artefact," to be
understood just as Benedict Anderson understands the "nations" that
fill up the history of the modern era (205). ''Identity," in Anderson's
study, is not an innate phenomenon but a product culturally and
historically fabricated to local specifications by narratives that are
more or less cooperative (the narrative of literature cooperative with
the narrative of history, for example) and more or less conscious. This
is not a breath-taking insight; contemporary literary critics and
historians are weaned on the idea of the constructedness of meanings.
Students and critics of southern literature, however, have been more
rigorously schooled than others in the orthodox faith that our subject
is not invented by our discussions of it but rather is revealed by a
constant southern identity. From the polemical writings of the
Agrarians to recent works of criticism, biography, literary history, and
even film reviews, the established formula is repeated, the narrative of
forgetting and making continued. It is not so much southern literature
that changes in collision with history but history that is subtly changed
in collision with southern literature. Inventing Southern Literature is,
then, not a counternarrative that seeks to dynamite the rails on which
the official narrative runs; rather, it is a metanarrative, touching upon
crucial moments when and where the official narrative is made or
problematically redirected. Readings of individual novels, when they
occur in this work, are not intended primarily as acts of interpretation