Crossroads of Southern Culture and Narrative

Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism, by Richard Gray. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2000. xiv + 535 pp. $75.00.

The Narrative Forms of Southern Community, by Scott Romine. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999. xi + 226 pp. $49.95.

The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s, by McKay Jenkins. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999. ix + 215 pp. $34.95.

Richard Gray's Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism, Scott Romine's The Narrative Forms of Southern Community, and McKay Jenkins' The South in Black and White all explore the rhetorical strategies of southern writers attempting to construct--or deconstruct--visions of coherent southern communities. In their focus on how southern writers have constructed the idea of the South and of southern culture, the three works reflect the growing critical interest among southernists in what Gray calls "Southern self-fashioning," particularly the interplay between aesthetics and culture; one thinks immediately, for instance, of the recent work of Michael Kreyling (Inventing Southern Literature) and Patricia Yaeger (Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990). These days critics are not so much inventing southern literature as reinventing it, typically by casting aside the critical assumptions and canon established by the New Criticism in order to construct a more pluralistic notion of southernness and southern literature. These are heady times for southernists, with the paradigms repeatedly being exploded by revisionist studies. Gray, Romine, and Jenkins all reflect this revisionary impulse, with all three setting out to rework traditional notions of southern literature and regional identity. Of the three books, Gray's is the most ambitious and extensive in scope, Romine's is the most provocative and sophisticated, and Jenkins' is the most sincerely heartfelt (but in the end, the least useful).

Gray attempts to revise the canon and our understanding of regionalism by exploring southern writers who have been marginalized from the dominant southern literary traditions and who have struggled to construct alternative fictions and alternative Souths. Writers he examines include Edgar Allan Poe, Ellen Glasgow, Andrew Lytle, Stark Young, Erskine Caldwell and other writers of the rural poor, Jesse Stuart and other mountain writers, and a wide-ranging collection of contemporary writers, including Cormac McCarthy, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Ernest Gaines. Linking this diverse group of writers are their struggles in defining themselves against--or with, as is the case with Lytle and Young--the prevailing myths of southernness and southern culture that have shaped the identity of the region since the early nineteenth century and, arguably, long before that.

While Gray's analysis is almost always perceptive and engaging, some of it stands out as particularly intriguing. His chapter on Poe, for instance, brilliantly explores Poe's troubled and complicated relationship with the South and southern identity. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu's ideas on post-aristocratic society and aesthetic detachment, Gray examines how Poe's identification as a southern gentleman profoundly shaped his artistic practice. It is not just that Poe worked with decidedly southern themes --for example, evil and human imperfection, mysterious and threatening women, the inescapable past--but that he embraced an ideal of aristocratic detachment which shaped his aesthetic philosophy and art, particularly his poetry. Configuring almost all of Poe's work, Gray writes, is the desire "to fashion a riposte to the marketplace, to forge an antitype to the bourgeois standards of hurry, acquisition, and accumulation"; and that antitype is the standard of aristocratic refinement and artistic playfulness, manifested in "a world of aristocratic ease and contemplation where refined players can play refined--because quite literally meaningless--games." Gray's chapter is a gem of close reading informed by critical insight and cultural theory, and it is one of the best discussions we have of Poe's tortuous relationship with the South.

Gray's informative chapters on Glasgow and the Agrarians (with a...