Southern literature is substantially recognizable as contingent upon certain identifiers: geographic, social, cultural, political, as well as historical and linguistic contingencies that make up what is known and named as "the South." Of course history remains a core emphasis in this arrangement, but to think of southern writing in terms of its organizational forms and features instead of its chronological appearance also shifts the grounds of historical emphasis. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. Photograph by Flickr user Lord_of_the_Flies. The claim to order that is presented here highlights selected genres indelibly associated with the South: the plantation novel, the slave narrative, southwestern humor, southern pastoral and "counter-pastoral," southern modernism, the southern grotesque, and yes, even " grit lit." Genre in Relation to History and Historical Coverage Staircase at Square Books, Oxford, Missippi, July 5, 2006. The present essay stresses the organizational forms, motifs, and stylistic conventions that can delineate the shape and presentation of a text (the text's genre, in other words) but also understands these matters as inevitably representing and promoting specific versions of culture. Anthologies and critical surveys usually gather works into groupings that emphasize specific time and history bound periods: antebellum, post-bellum, the " renascence" (equated with the "modern" or "the period between the two wars"), and most recently the post-modern, all the while insisting upon the importance of essentialized form over topical circumstance. This tradition is not without irony, given the other directive that has long governed southern literary study: the emphasis on promoting "internal" or a-historical, non-contingent readings of texts. An overview of southern literature based on a selection of key genres departs substantially from the program of traditional literary histories, which rely upon relatively static, periodic, historical reference points to arrange and provide nomenclatures for southern literature. Yet, the South can be said to have its own literary genres - its particular sets of forms or organizing motifs - as much as it has a history and manners. To some, genres are universal categories that describe formal literary conventions, not geo-social preoccupations. ![]() ![]() In defining a text's " southernness," the matter of its genre might not seem a touchstone of much value. " Southern literature" announces the conjunction of the US South and an expressive art - texts identified as belonging to a particular history, social organization, and cultural imaginary. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA-3.0. Courtesy of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. This essay considers southern literature in terms of generic forms that are, if not uniquely southern, substantially recognizable as contingent upon southern identifiers: geographic, social, cultural, as well as historical and linguistic contingencies that constitute "the South." Introduction Booklover's Map of the United States, 1949.
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