Romanticizing the Rough South: Contemporary Cultural Nakedness and the Rise of Grit Lit

The burgeoning success of Grit Lit is a direct result of a regional and national obsession with authenticity. In the midst of global homogenization, readers are increasingly drawn to narratives about enclaves that have or appear to have retained certain hallmarks of cultural distinctiveness. Levee on the Tallahatchie, Panola County, Mississippi, March 2016. All photographs by Chris Fowler.

The past three decades have seen a steady rise in the popularity of “Grit Lit”—a genre largely shaped by white male authors who are from, or at the very least write convincingly about, working-class communities, usually within the context of the U.S. South. In The Companion to Southern Literature, Robert Gingher explains that “Grit Lit” is the “facetious shorthand for fiction devoted to the rough edges (‘grit’) of life.” If in 2002, when Gingher articulated this definition, the moniker Grit Lit was used facetiously, that is certainly not the case today. Now, contemporary writers flash the label proudly; and literary presses, book purveyors, and fan websites rely on it to promote books published by writers of the South who inhabit or once inhabited the region’s poorest or most culturally marginalized spaces. For example, the University of South Carolina Press proudly markets the grittiness of their two Rough South anthologies, and the website goodreads.com provides a list of “Popular Grit Lit Books,” which currently features 570 volumes. The burgeoning success of Grit Lit is a direct result of a regional and national obsession with authenticity. In the midst of global homogenization, readers are increasingly drawn to narratives about enclaves that have or appear to have retained certain hallmarks of cultural distinctiveness. In the South, one such enclave—be it a physical, social, or class-based space—is the “Rough South,” and fictional narratives purportedly reflecting its authenticity appear tantalizing to audiences comprised predominantly of educated and middle-class consumers.¹

The rise in Grit Lit’s popularity needs to be investigated further in order to determine why exactly the reading class seems to relish the second-hand experience of the Rough South. Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader (2012), the first and, to date, only collection of Rough South prose, contains the following subject matter: dog fights in Tim McLaurin’s Keeper of the Moon; late-night shoot-outs in Rick Bragg’s Ava’s Man; a motorcycle-riding madman in Barry Hannah’s “Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter”; a drunken negligent mother in Larry Brown’s “Samaritans”; serial rapists in Dorothy Allison’s “River of Names”; a gun-wielding father and his “waterhead” son in Lewis Nordan’s The Sharpshooter Blues; flea market vendors and con artists in George Singleton’s “Jacksonville”; snake-handling Pentecostals in Lee Smith’s Saving Grace; boisterous moonshine-drinking prisoners in Robert Morgan’s “Sleepy Gap”; meth dealers in Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone; marijuana growers in Ron Rash’s “Speckled Trout”; and a car-stealing Lynyrd Skynyrd fan in Ann Pancake’s “Redneck Boys.” While these working-class narratives expand the literary canon, they also seem to codify a particular working-class identity in the name of southern authenticity.²

Attempts to locate “authentic” southern identities are by no means new. The scholarly equivalent of handwringing over identity in the South has existed as long as the idea of “the South” itself, and it has figured in ideological projects ranging from the justification of slavery, secession, and Jim Crow to the myth of southern

The first and, to date, only collection of Rough South prose contains the following subject matter: dog fights in Tim McLaurin’s Keeper of the Moon; late-night shoot-outs in Rick Bragg’s Ava’s Man; a motorcycle-riding madman in Barry Hannah’s “Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter”; a gun-wielding father and his “waterhead” son in Lewis Nordan’s The Sharpshooter Blues; flea market vendors and con artists in George Singleton’s “Jacksonville”; and snake-handling Pentecostals in Lee Smith’s Saving Grace. Leflore County, Mississippi, March 2015.

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