Appalachian Literature

APPALACHIAN LITERATURE by Anne Shelby Parti Fifteen years ago, nobody was talking about Appalachian literature. Although a few bibliographers and dissertation writers had taken notice of the rather large body of writing from and about the southern mountains , they had not called it "Appalachian literature," and American criticism has generally ignored that body of writing, dismissing it either as a deservedly obscure collection of popular sentimental fiction or as a kind of eccentric relation to the literature of the American South.1 In the 1970s, however, 29 publishers issued the first anthologies of Appalachian literature, courses in Appalachian literature joined the offerings of college English departments, and a regional scholarly journal hosted a lively debate about the definition and merits of the newfound Appalachian literature. One side of that argument bases its case on the following grounds: (1) that the Appalachian mountains have harbored a distinct and largely homogeneous population, with a history and culture significantly different from those of the rest of the country, including the deep South; (2) that the culture has produced a body of literature that reflects its own values, history, and ways of perceiving the world; and (3) that that body of literature merits more serious critical attention than it has received. Those arguments follow a pattern familiar to American literary history. Justifications for the study of southern literature, black literature, women's literature , and, earlier, of American literature, had rested on similar arguments: that experience shared by a group—by Americans but not by Europeans, by southerners but not by northerners , by blacks but not by whites, by women but not by men—had given rise to a unique body of literature, heretofore neglected because of its differences, but worthy of recognition and of serious study. The belated discovery of an Appalachian literature, then, would seem to rest on solid and fertile ground. For others, however, the mere juxtaposition of the words Appalachian and literature is a disturbing contradiction in terms. Countering with the objection that the region has produced , at best, only minor works by minor authors, they regard talk of an Appalachian literature as a dubious attempt to elevate to respectable literary status the marginal writings of a few now obscure local colorists, some popular sentimentalists of the bucolic, and a handful of major authors who passed through the mountains on their way to somewhere else.2 There are problems with both arguments. Both positions generally agree on the first two premises: that Appalachia is a distinct region with a distinct culture, and that it has produced a body of writing. The disagreement comes in step three, in which both arguments seem to jump to unwarranted conclusions about the quality of that writing: the first to assume that if the literature is regional and unrecognized, it merits recognition now; the second, that if the literature is regional and largely unrecognized, it has probably received already as much attention as it really deserves. Both arguments are based on different notions of what a regional literature is, but the literature of the southern mountains seems to fit neither the definition of regional literature as the native expression of a unique culture nor as the recording in fiction of the peculiarities of life in a particular locale. Donald Davidson's warning that it is impossible to separate literary works into categories labelled "regional," "national," or "universal" applies to Appalachian literature as well.3 In degrees ranging from the embarrassingly obvious to the subtly evocative, the fiction set in the Appalachian mountains evinces concerns that American criticism has identified as both national and universal. That does not, as some argue, provide a defense for the merit of the literature; it does suggest, however, that the labeling of a work as "regional literature" —whatever meanings one attaches to that term—is neither appropriate nor useful, deadending , on the one hand, in tortured defenses of the work of writers who, often for good reason, have never been regarded as important American authors, and, on the other hand, in objections based on the assumption that "regional literature" by definition offers little to reward serious investigation. There are difficulties, too, in even identifying the works that would constitute a regional...