Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today

Preface

Preface We are eighteen experienced critics of southern literature with many publications behind us. Most of us are southerners, and six of us are Europeans. We are admirers of the great writers of the South and teach the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Madison Jones, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith—in short, we deal with most of the classic southern writers on a daily basis and write about them. This means that mostly we work on literature by accepted and universally established authors and that nobody doubts the relevance of our writing about the southern classics. But here we write about novels published from 1997 to 2009. The fact is many southern novels are published every year, but for the most part their shelf life is unreasonably short. Often a new novel—even an excellent one—appears in print, drops out of sight immediately, and is not heard about again. This is why my fellow critics and I have decided to stick out our necks and pronounce. We feel an urge to tell you about new novels that deserve to be kept in print. Our goal was to make a useful book. We asked ourselves a few simple questions : Which good southern writers recently published novels? What can we do to keep those novels in print? What can we do to make people read these new novels? We thought of the lay reader, the guy lost before the screen or behind the sports pages, general readers both outside and within the academy. The eighteen novels we picked are good and should be better known than they are. Thus the idea behind every essay in the book is to convince a potential reader that this one novel is worth reading, that it deserves our attention, and that it is not necessary to have read other novels by the same author or other authors to appreciate that one book. You may search this book for your favorite southern novel and ask why the editor chose the novels and novelists that appear here. But the critics picked the novels they wanted to write about, so the question should be why did the editor pick these critics to write about today’s southern novel? A short version of my answer follows: I published my first essay on southern literature thirty years ago (it was on Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead”); since then I viii Preface have kept a keen eye on the literary criticism written on southern literature. I got to know critics by listening to them at conferences, by reviewing their work, and by editing and coediting volumes on Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor (two), Walker Percy, Madison Jones, southern landscapes, and the South in the 1990s, as well as two southern issues of periodicals. Just who the best critics are varies substantially from decade to decade; in the late 1980s and early 1990s women dominated both as novelists and excellent critics. Now, at the end of the first decade after 2000, men clearly dominate both as novelists and critics. I cannot explain the shifting gender distribution in literary achievement, but I know this will probably change again within a few years. As it is the essays in Still in Print have been written not only by prominent established critics but also by talented young critics, who will influence future criticism of the southern novel. Let me add that the canon of the southern novel is not simply a local product ; it is the result of an international collaboration. If you know your literary history, you know that both Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner could thank French critics for their lasting place in world literature. Today the European Union, with almost twice as many readers as the United States, is contributing substantially to the sale and study of the southern novel. Since 1988 there has been a very active and influential European Southern Studies Forum, which reflects the curious fact that more southern fiction is probably being taught at European universities than at American institutions. The reader will notice that Still in Print reflects this situation, as one-third of the essays on new southern novels are by critics from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and the United Kingdom. We do not want you to get bogged down in the writers’ biographies, but at the beginning of each essay there is a...