[Americana Etc.] An Introduction to Southern Literature
The literature of the Southern United States―the place where I come from―has been and can be many things, but above all it is the literature of the haunted. It is the literature of a land that is at once beautiful, verdant, and serene, while at the same time has been fraught with tension, anger, and fear. It is a fertile place for ghosts because of its deep connection with its own past, and ghosts are nothing if not metaphors for the things in our past we wish to forget but cannot. When I say that Southern literature is the literature of the haunted, I do not mean that all Southern stories are horror or ghost stories; what I mean instead is that Southern literature has often been characterized by an obsession with the past, and this can take the form of shame or longing. William Faulkner, arguably the greatest writer the South ever produced, wrote in his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” What he meant by that is that the past―sometimes the recent past, sometimes the distant past―lingers with us in the present and refuses to go away entirely no matter what we do. The South is a haunted place and Southerners can often be haunted people, in one way or another. The great writers of literature from this area were adept at tapping into this feeling of being haunted and all of the complexities that come with it. In this piece I would like to provide a basic primer to this particular regional variety of American literature and highlight some of the men and women who made it famous. But what I hope to achieve is to spur an interest in this genre because I believe―perhaps with a certain admitted bias―that Southern literature contains within it some of the greatest examples of American literature. These stories are awash in guilt, tension, horror, romance, religious fervor, honor, humor, and cruelty. In them, you will find a great deal about blood-the blood that unites families, the spilt blood of the enemy, the blood of the innocent and the brave, and even the blood of Christ.
So, before I go too much farther into all of this, I had better establish just what exactly I mean by “the South” of the United States. The Southern states are basically defined as being those on the South Eastern side of the country below the Mason-Dixon Line that divides Pennsylvania from West Virginia and Maryland. Another definition would be the states that were a part of the Confederacy during the American Civil War and those nearby (it has been said that all Southern literature can be traced back to the fact that the South lost that war). The states that are totally, indisputably Southern include Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina (my own home state), South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Oklahoma, West Virginia, Missouri, and Maryland are sometimes included as being at least partially Southern culturally. The northern part of Florida, known as the Panhandle, is certainly culturally Southern, but that dissipates the further South you go into the state. Texas is sort of its own beast in this regard: it is both the South and the West in many respects.
Margaret Mitchell, she of Gone with the Wind fame and the woman responsible for many peoples’ inaccurate image of the chivalrous, romantic, not-all-that-racist Old South; and last but not least, old Mark Twain himself, the novelist who gave the world The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Many of the most famous works of American literature were written by Southerners and concerned the South itself.
By Prof. Matthew Ross
Dept. of English Language and Literature