Introduction: The Twenty-First-Century Southern Novel

CHRISTOPHER LLOYD University of Hertfordshire Introduction: The Twenty-First-Century Southern Novel THE RELEASE OF HARPER LEE’S GO SET A WATCHMAN. TO INTERNATIONAL excitement in the summer of 2015 revitalized the question as to Lee’s place in the scope of twentieth-century literature, the canonicity of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), and the role of the southern novel in contemporary culture. Lee’s death in February 2016 was a further reminder of her significance to readers everywhere. Lee’s first novel has been held up as a classic worldwide, speaking both to its southern contexts as well as to larger debates about race and morality. It is one of the most well loved and well known southern novels (second only to Gone with the Wind.), and is still dominant in book clubs and classrooms across the world—though its appearance in academic criticism is perhaps waning. If Go Set a Watchman reveals anything (for it is surely not as important or complete as its predecessor), it is that Lee’s fictions of race in the rural South are as consumable and desirable as ever. Though the novel has broken sales records internationally, and southern culture is continuously sought after by mass audiences (think True Detective or Duck Dynasty or Carrie Underwood), the place of southern literature in the academic canon is still, perhaps, precarious. Publications such as Mississippi Quarterly and south: a scholarly journal (previously the Southern Literary Journal.) are doing much to disseminate important and original scholarship on the region, but more general literary and cultural studies journals seem largely to omit the South. Of course, this is generalizing, but from experience, a number of American and European literature journals have rejected proposals of southern criticism for being too “particular.” (The particularity of the South is, as any reader of this journal will know, a long-debated and often tiresome conversation.) My colleagues and I have been struck by the responses of numerous editors who do not conceive of the South and southern literature as being substantial or general enough to fit in their publications. 312 Christopher Lloyd This special issue, therefore, has four central aims. First, the issue argues for the legitimacy and importance of the twenty-first-century southern novel within the larger frame of contemporary literature from the US. Second, the issue offers a textual route out of, or beyond, the theoretical debates that dominate new southern studies; that is, the text, here, is of more importance than the theoretical minefield of what constitutes southern literature or what southern studies should be.1 Third, in doing so, the issue synthesizes the prevailing binary of routes/roots to and from the region. That is, there are arguments both for the “roots” of the South (its continuities, its historical traces, its suffusion with the past, its persistent socioeconomic structures, and its tangible identity) and “routes” of/from the South (its imbrication in other geographies and cultures, its role in transnational networks, its lack of distinctness and fixedness). Rather than simply fall on one side of this (imagined?) binary, the issue will entangle these notions, seeing the South as placed and placeless, entrenched and unmoored. Fourth, the articles here will produce an expansive range of textual and intellectual frameworks that are original and important. In all, this special issue of Mississippi Quarterly. will not only constructively engage with debates on contemporary southern novels, but it will also act as a working model for further studies in the field. I will touch upon some of the intellectual stakes of the issue below, but here it’s worth saying something about the fictional works explored within. The present articles examine seven diverse authors, but a special issue like this should also spell out the breadth of the southern novel today. I want to offer an exhausting, but far from exhaustive, list to make the point that the southern novel is not only alive and well, but also flourishing in a multitude of forms. Thus, I call on scholars and critics—“southernists” and otherwise—to explore, in addition to those featured here, writers such as James Braziel, Larry Brown, James Lee Burke, Pam Durban, Connie May Fowler, Tom Franklin, Patty...