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American Literature 73.2 (2001) 432-433



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Inventing Southern Literature. By Michael Kreyling. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi. 1998. xviii, 200 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $17.00.

In his thought-provoking and iconoclastic Inventing Southern Literature, Michael Kreyling uses Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities as a theoretical base to demonstrate that “southern literature—an amalgam of literary history, interpretive traditions, and a canon—is a cultural product, or ‘artefact’” (ix). While this view of literature may not be considered highly novel, rightly points out that the established critics of Southern literature have been and, to some extent, remain peculiarly resistant to regional identity as an imaginative and ideological construct. Inventing Southern Literature is a long overdue exploration of the explanations for, development of, and challenges to the ostensibly timeless nature of Southern identity on which the canon of Southern literature was established.

Kreyling explores what became the seminal pronouncements of the Agrarians, particularly Allen Tate, who believed that Southern identity was not subject to reason or test but could only be apprehended as one would a religious faith (11). The Agrarians’ beliefs were then rigidly codified by their disciple, Richard Weaver, who saw the South as the last remaining bastion of the transcendent ideals of Western civilization. Louis Rubin, arguably the giant of [End Page 432] Southern literary studies, is, to Kreyling, the critic who performed the unenviable task of bringing these earlier theoretical pronouncements about the South into the concrete form of anthologies and a literary canon. He argues that while Rubin does attempt to deal with the daily problems of race relations amid all this transcendent idealism, Rubin also tries to paper over them with the concept of a Southern community with which both black and white could identify. Kreyling sees the earlier demand for a timeless and pure Southern identity re-emerging in the 1990s in such diverse ways as the foundation of the Southern League, the flying of the rebel flag, and Eugene Genovese’s attempted rehabilitation of Southern conservative intellectuals.

While I found Kreyling’s deconstruction of Southern literary theory necessary and useful, I was most engaged by his explorations of the way these dicta affected the literature, as in his chapter on anthologies of Southern literature. Kreyling then reads the late works of Faulkner, Southern literature’s god, as exhibiting the author’s “anxiety of influence” toward his own early and supposedly classically Southern works to the point of “self-parody” (130, 147). Kreyling sees a similarly defensive use of Faulkner parody in the works of writers like Reynolds Price and Barry Hannah who have often been viewed as slavishly imitating him. In readings of the African American writers Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Raymond Andrews, and Ernest Gaines, Kreyling questions the attempt by recent critics like Fred Hobson to fit these writers into a Southern literary tradition that Kreyling regards as largely inimical to them. He sees Southern women writers like Josephine Humphreys, Jill McCorkle, and Lee Smith as attempting to build a feminist-utopian tradition outside the bounds of the traditional concepts of Southern identity. Because of readings such as these as well as Kreyling’s historical overview, Inventing Southern Literature is a book that must be read by scholars and teachers of Southern literature so that we may examine what we mean by Southern literature before we discuss or teach it.

Veronica Makowsky , University of Connecticut



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