Lucinda MacKethan, An Overview of Southern Literature by Genre

The name "southern literature" announces the conjunction of a region and an expressive art, texts immediately identified as belonging to a particular history and social organization. In defining a text's regionality, the matter of its genre might not seem a touchstone of much value. To some, genres are universal categories that describe formal literary conventions, not local or regional preoccupations. Yet as the following overview seeks to demonstrate, the South can be said to have its own genres—its particular sets of literary forms or organizing motifs—as much as it has its own history and manners. An overview of southern literature based on a selection of key southern genres departs substantially from the program of traditional literary histories, which rely upon relatively static, periodic, historical reference points to arrange and provide nomenclatures for southern literature. This tradition is not without irony, given the other directive that has long governed southern literary study: the emphasis on promoting "internal" or a-historical, non-contingent readings of texts. Anthologies and critical surveys usually gather works into groupings that emphasize specific time and history bound periods: antebellum, post-bellum, the "renascence" (equated with the "modern" or "the period between the two wars"), and most recently the post-modern, all the while insisting upon the importance of essentialized form over topical circumstance. The following overview stresses the organizational forms, motifs, and stylistic conventions that can delineate the shape and presentation of a text (the text's genre, in other words) but also sees these matters as inevitably reflecting and promoting specific versions of culture. Thus the claim to order that is reflected here highlights key genres that the South, as region, has either called into being or interpreted/modified so that they bear indelibly the stamp of regional definition: the plantation novel, the slave narrative, southwestern humor, southern pastoral and "counter-pastoral," southern modernism, the southern grotesque, and yes, even "grit lit."

We will be looking here at southern literature in terms of generic forms that are, if not uniquely southern, substantially recognizable as contingent upon southern identifiers: geographic, social, cultural, as well as historical and linguistic contingencies that make up what we know as and name "the South." Of course history remains a core emphasis in this arrangement, but to think of southern writing in terms of its organizational forms and features instead of its chronological appearance also shifts the grounds of historical emphasis. For instance, to group southern literature under the headings "antebellum" and "postbellum" makes the Civil War the great rationale of literary production. However, if we look at nineteenth century southern literature under the headings of thematic or stylistic or plot-oriented genres that authors chose during the time, what we see is that the South's race-based institution of slavery was the driving force behind literary production. A southern slavocracy is what called into being the first, and in many ways most distinctively southern literatures. Slavery and the racial divisions it enforced by law and custom necessitated a multitude of literary forms of response, engagement, and argument: from what we call the plantation novel to the slave narrative; from the slave narratives of the 1830s to the neo-slave narratives of the 1980s and '90s; from the "anti-Tom" novels crafted in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin down to the blockbuster historical epics of the Civil Rights Era (Alex Haley’s Roots, Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, for example).

To claim that there are "southern" genres of literature might seem to divorce the region's writing from some concept of mainstream or universal value, and indeed southern writers have always chafed under the regional label, regardless of how the term "southern" was being applied to their productions. Can all southern literature be neatly arranged under regional generic headings? Probably not. The overview that follows is not a "historical coverage" model. It can also be noted that any vision of arrangement that a southern literary historian might choose results in inclusions and exclusions based on both literary and political ideologies that privilege certain values—and certain literary forms or discourses—over others. The preference that an overview by "region-based" genre asserts is that of forms, motifs, and conventions, but this preference also reflects the current theoretical argument that genres are codes constructed from as well as speaking to historical contingency.

Genre, as much as if not more than other literary characteristics such as character, setting, plot, and language, reflects choices made on the basis of a writer's and a reader's relationship to the world(s) they inhabit and the world(s) they share within a text. To speak of a "southern" literature in any dimension is to frame writer and work within geographic boundaries but also within identity boundaries, within the scope of issues of group identification based on broad, multiple, often even oppositional cultural frames. These frames are all contained, however uneasily, within the rubric "southern," which has always meant different things to differently identified groups at different times. The literary label "southern" asserts its various meanings in part through the distinctive sets of literary works we can find that practice similar modes of expression, organization, and motive—in other words, genres.

We might begin to address definitional questions by noting that Southern Literature is itself a genre: a body of texts bound together and meeting expectations of readers through similarities in areas of theme, setting, mood, message, structure, plot etc. The first southern literatures and indeed the first critical pronouncements about southern literature appeared at a time when the South itself, as region, was beginning to understand its regionality in terms of cultural difference—in terms of what its way of life was not, and what it was positioned against. In the 1830s, the North imposed this sense of difference from without, through the abolitionist societies and literatures that began to flood media outlets. One of the earliest statements of what southern literature needed to be and to do was announced in one of the first southern literary journals, Southern Literary Messenger. Its inaugural 1834 issue called for southerners to support a distinctly southern, ie. Not Northern literature. By 1856, in much more strident tones, the Messenger was dictating "The Duty of Southern Authors" in an editorial. Beginning in the 1830s, Northern writers and readers were busily creating assumptions about the South’s difference, and writers and readers of the South correspondingly defined themselves against the place (the North) or the ideology (Anti-Slavery, Industrial Capitalism) that they saw themselves as different from. Then and now, insiders and outsiders involved in the dynamics of regionalism have both shaped and relied upon types, themes, and conventions that come to define particular places as well as modes of expression. These modes constitute what I call Southern Genres. The ideological as well as artistic processes that identified the first southern genres have continued to do so throughout the twentieth century, from the southern agrarians' revolt against a national urban-industrial complex in the 1930s, embodied in pastoral forms, to the anti-establishment, anti-"Southern Living" agendas of self-identified Poor South writers of recent times, embodied in what we have come to call "Grit Lit."

The work of Genre construction is to categorize texts according to shared features of content or structure or stylistic conventions or rhetorical function. From The Southern Literary Messenger to The Companion to Southern Literature (2002), scholars and readers have looked for ways to differentiate southern literature from that of other regions (including American literature, itself conceivably a regional genre) by identifying these features. If we go back fifty years, we find in Robert Heilman's essay, entitled "The Southern Temper," a seminal exercise in genre making (it was first published in 1952 in Rubin and Jacobs, Southern Renascence, and was reprinted in 1961 in Rubin and Jacobs, South: Modern Southern Literature in its Cultural Setting). Heilman identified five features of the southern literary mind that made for distinctively "southern" texts based on analysis of what he considered to be the important fiction of the modern period, and these qualities directed the reading of southern literature for a generation. The quest to classify the literature has continued unabated for the last half-century, although critics have disagreed vigorously over where to look for the distinguishing conventions that allow the assignment of genre identification to texts. In today's critical climate we understand that, as Thomas Beebee (in The Ideology of Genre, 1994) tells us, all genres are ideological. William Gilmore Simms, when he wanted to attack Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, wrote scathingly not of her abolitionist argument but of how she had transgressed against the limits of the historical romance. When the Southern Agrarians wanted to protest the excesses of the capitalistic machine and the soul-killing effects of scientific dominance, they wrote one manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. However, the more productive and effective channel for their cause was their championing, in dozens of critical studies and in their own poems and novels, of a mythologically, instead of an historically, ordered past. They invoked an ideal of communal memory in order to rebuke the disordered present, an agenda that identifies their productions as pastoral, a genre defined by its practitioners’ intention to provide social critique within clearly defined literary conventions.

The selection of southern genres outlined in this overview indicates one more key element of the genre approach: Genres classify works according to similarities, but they thrive and depend upon difference, not only differences in conventions and forms, but differences in the ways that groups within regions experience history. The slave South produced the radically different genres of slave narrative and plantation romance. The agrarian South produced both pastoral and anti-pastoral. The South in its self-conscious, Renascence period produced both what we might call an establishment modernist narrative and, as counterforms, the grotesque narrative and the "grit" narrative. Two other categories of genre differentiation have been avoided in my overview: the splitting off or subdividing of women's and African American literature into tracks that parallel or become subheadings of Southern Literature. Considering African American and southern women's literary history apart from that of white or white male writers has been responsible for sometimes meaningful, but often arbitrary and misleading, exclusionary readings. Women’s literary versions of southern history and culture resulted in their adaptation of some traditionally male genres and their creation of others. We can speak, for instance, of the mother/daughter genre of southern fiction. Yet certain splits—including the division of plantation literature into the male romance and the female domestic novel—result in artificial barriers to the understanding of common imagery and intention. Likewise, to segregate white southern literature from African American literature means that we are perpetually looking, half-dimensionally, at only one side of a coin. For example, two historically contingent literary "renaissances" grew out of southern experience in the early twentieth century: the Harlem Renaissance and the Southern Renascence. As differently "placed" as they might seem from the designations "Harlem" and "Southern," the literatures that are categorized within these separate concepts of "flowerings" share many of the same historical contingencies. One has only to read John Crowe Ransom's "Antique Harvesters" and Jean Toomer's "Harvest Song," both of them key expressions of an artistic impulse embedded in southern history, to see how important it is to look across categories that separate literary studies. Genre divisions potentially can highlight meaningful differences or obscure or distort them, so any useful classification by genres must address how literary categories speak to one another. Inclusive genre study tells us about many Souths. We can use genre classifications to collect many southern histories reflected in regionalized literary conventions, and from genres we can learn many ways to read the incredibly rich and diverse worlds that three centuries of writing in and out of the South represent.

The following overview considers three distinct southern literatures each defined by regional concerns. The cultures of several Souths are embedded in literatures of slavery, literatures of pastoral, and literatures of resistance. In gathering literary examples of these different organizations, it is not surprising that most of the examples come from fiction and autobiography, which tend to be constructed from social dynamics and structures that follow the narrative flow of history. Although this overview does not attempt to use southern poetry and drama very extensively for illustrations, certainly both genres furnish examples of each of the regional categories that we will follow, and indeed for the Southern Agrarians, poetry was a primary vehicle. A different question concerns the idea of "the southern poem" as a genre. A new anthology, Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Southern Poetry (University of Virginia Press, 2003), makes the positive case with a large gathering of representative poems. Four valuable essays that also consider this question are:

While the place and function of a regionally defined southern poetry is beyond our scope here, the four essays listed above provide a compelling argument for the idea that such a genre exists, and the same case might be made for a genre of southern drama. A recent book by Kenneth Holditch, Tennessee Williams and the South (University Press of Mississippi, 2002), demonstrates the regional approach to the South's most important dramatist, and Charles S. Watson's The History of Southern Drama (University Press of Kentucky, 1997) offers a complete overview of the form within southern contexts.

Another important discussion that needs to take place concerns the question of the place of Appalachian literature within a southern regionalist literary history. No other southern region, defined geographically, has generated as much separate study as the literature of this area. Valuable anthologies include Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings of Southern Appalachia (1987). eds. Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose N. Manning. and its sequel, Appalachia Inside Out: A Sequel to Voices from the Hills (1995), eds. Higgs, Manning, and Jim Wayne Miller; and Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers (2000), ed. Joyce Dyer.