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American Literature 74.1 (2002) 176-177



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Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism. By Richard Gray. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. 2000. xiv, 535 pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $34.95.

Gray's important book, Southern Aberrations, opens by arguing that the very concept of Southernness is defined by its "aberrance": by its presumed (and dialectical) divergence from a cultural "norm" of "the North or the American nation" (500). Reading Poe and Ellen Glasgow in the context of early themes of divergence developed by antebellum plantation novelists, Gray traces the literary fallout of perceived geographic and economic alienation from a national cultural capital for these early writers, a fallout emblematized by Poe's contradictory tendency to "compensate for, [as well as] revel in, his ‘deviance'" (34), and Glasgow's equally conflictual melding of irony and sympathy in her historical novels of the defeated Virginia elite.

Turning to a different configuration of "norm" and "aberrance" in the middle section, Gray focuses on the Agrarian critics of the 1930s to 1950s and their effort to reconstruct the South as an alternative center for American culture, complete with its own institutionalized canon and literary-historical master narrative. Their rigid definition of Southern literature, Gray argues, denied the intrinsic plurality of cultures in the southern United States and effectually labeled as "aberrant" all writings by Southern authors who were not white, elite, and wedded to aesthetic "traditionalism" (153). While pointing out that even the original architects of this canon, notably Louis D. Rubin Jr., began this critique decades ago, Gray contributes significantly to this project through extensive readings of two categories of midcentury fiction that he argues were written out of the Southern literary canon: proletarian novels and novels of Appalachia. Exposing the elitist bias of midcentury definitions of Southern literature, he also has chosen groups that reveal the whiteness that too often has been assumed to be a synonym for Southern. As Gray focuses on class by looking at literary representations of proletarian Piedmont and upland peoples, he replicates the Agrarians' exclusion of African American writers in his discussion of "southern aberrations" and "resistances" (502). Even the whitest of the upland Agrarians inhabit a literature that has been shaped in its "aberrance" and richness by the voices of African American influence.

Surveying a broad range of contemporary fiction in order to ponder the effects of Sunbelt migration and, more briefly, globalization on the relevance and survival of a Southern regionalist literature, Gray ends his last chapter [End Page 176] with a reading of Ernest Gaines and, more tellingly, concludes this chronological study with an achronological gesture backward to Hurston's 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God. Given pride of place, Hurston's presence underlines the segregation of the previous sections, raising the questions of race that Gray never directly addresses. Yet perhaps the questions of racial diversity, racist hierarchy, and antiracist struggle constitute those "southern aberrations" that have invested and continue to invest Southern regionalist literature with pertinence and urgency for national and international audiences.

Jennifer Rae Greeson , Columbia Society of Fellows
Candace Waid , University of California, Santa Barbara



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