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  • Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961
  • Laura Quinn
Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961. By Gary Richards. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. 256. $44.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

This impressive and useful monograph manages to be both ambitious and compact, both careful and lively. Richards, an associate professor of English at New Orleans University, challenges what he sees as an evasion of homosexuality in critical discourse on southern literature in the era designated the "Southern Renaissance." The book is ambitious in its theoretical grounding in contemporary gay/lesbian and/or queer theory and in its corrective, revisionary claims for its historicized geographical subject. Its compactness is enabled by the author's skill at close reading of texts as well as the incisiveness of his encapsulation of critical genealogies. The book is a lively [End Page 330] read because of its quite distinctive lucidity—with respect to both textual exegesis and theoretical deployments—and because the six authors he has chosen for case study and the sometimes lesser-known works he explores are illuminated and enlivened by his analyses. This study's final signature feature—its "carefulness"—manifests itself in several ways. First, in terminological distinctions between, for instance, same-sex desire and homosexuality and again between what he calls gender transitivity/intransitivity, along with his title phrase, sexual otherness, and the fixedness of homosexual identity, which he wants to question. Additionally, he has not "significantly deployed the term queer" because it "risks sacrificing the centrality of desire and same-sex desire in particular" (2). Second, in a cautionary claim that, while the fiction he chooses for study clearly foregrounds homoeroticism, a reader should not only not "presume an absence in an uninterrogated text, one also should not presume a presence" (4–5). Third, in resisting "homophiliac" readings of southern fiction, as "this study works against the erection of a univocal southern gay/lesbian canon," seeking to see instead that "these six writers' representations of same-sex desire are contradictory and disruptive of critical continuities" (6).

The six Southern Renaissance writers in Richards's anticanon are Truman Capote, William Goyen, Richard Wright, Lillian Smith, Harper Lee, and Carson McCullers. Richards argues that each exemplifies the centrality of same-sex desire in southern mid-twentieth-century fiction, that these representations of desire get "quarantined" in critical discourse, and yet that each writer does quite distinct and (largely) unprecedented fictional things with this desire. His first chapter, "Freaks with a Voice," tracks the critical foundations of Southern Renaissance literary discourse in order to establish and explain its propensity to quarantine its "freaks." By this compelling account, the Southern Renaissance emerges as a defensive move against charges of cultural aridity in the twentieth-century South, notably exemplified by H. L. Mencken's disparaging 1917 essay, "The Sahara of the Bozart" (8). The archresponders to this charge were the members of the Nashville Agrarian group, composed of "former Fugitives and eventual New Critics," including Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, and other self-nominated gatekeepers of this Renaissance (9). The Agrarian agenda was conservative, family values oriented, and fixed on minimizing "the presence of same-sex desire (and other disruptive elements of otherness and multiplicity) in twentieth-century southern literature" (18). Richards argues that the agenda-laden Agrarian aesthetic was paradoxically compatible with the supposedly apolitical formalism of New Criticism and that this fusion had critical staying power in the last half of the twentieth century. He argues further that, when this paradigm began to shift, it tended to compensate for decades of neglect or reductive treatment of race and racism by "belaboring these issues at the minimization or exclusion of others," effectively "quarantining" sexual otherness yet again (21). That [End Page 331] is, southern critics did this; nonsouthern critics, by contrast, emphasized sexual otherness in southern texts as depravity—most memorably, Leslie Fiedler in his identifications of the gothic in Faulkner and his famous claim that "post–World War II American fiction can be roughly divided into 'the Jewish-heterosexual wing' and 'the Southern homosexual'" (quoted on 27). Richards sees this nonsouthern critical "quarantining...

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