THE LANGUAGE OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH
Cleanth Brooks
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
58 pp, $9.95 (cloth)
IMAGES OF THE SOUTHERN WRITER
Mark Morrow
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
97 pp., $24.95 (cloth)
THE HISTORY OF SOUTHERN LITERATURE
Mark Morrow
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.
626 pp., $29.95 (cloth)
In the course of its illustrious history the South has produced prolifically seven varieties of humankind: statesmen, soldiers, preachers, singers, beautiful women, football players, and writers. The glory days of Southern statesmanship have passed, the droll presidency of an inconspicuous Georgian having torpedoed the notion that Southerners possess an intuitive knack for statecraft. Ebullient prosperity and slackened pugnacity have dampened the Southerner's ardor for the military virtues. The demise of the Virtuoso blues men and women and Nashville's apotheosis of meretriciousness spell the doom of gritty integrity in music. What does that leave the South? Fiddle with the radio dial on a Sunday morning anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line and one discovers immediately that the region still teems with exhorters, Biblethumpers, foot-stomping gospelers and hell-fire-and-damnation shouters, both black and white. The women still flaunt their beguiling charms (though these days the beguiler is liable to be a shrewd and canny attorney rather than a mesmerizing ornament of parlor and ballroom), and if Bo Jackson is a fair indication, halfbacks continue to sprout like kudzu on a steamy July afternoon.
Although the typical Southerner likely views the literary vocation as a species of half-demented eccentricity akin to cultivating mung beans or dynamiting catfish, writers abound like chiggers in a rampant stand of Johnson grass. One suspects that the South contains more novelists, poets, and playwrights per square mile than anywhere this side of Manhattan. From the time he picks up his first pencil, the Southerner churns with an urge to deface reams of paper with his lucubrations, imaginings, and purple-prose musings. An especially virulent malady known as Faulkneriosis infects thousands of Southerners, annually, while hookworm, pellagra, and trichinosis have largely succumbed to the ministrations of medical ingenuity. The cognomen "Southern writer" command the same instantaneous recognition as "Philadelphia lawyer," "Wall Street broker," or "French whore."
Along with the feverish scribbling of novels, plays, and poems, Southerners have created a major growth-industry that employs scores of diligent workers in composing books, articles, and doctoral dissertations about the region's imaginative literature. No Southern university is so benighted or penurious as not to boast at least one specialist in Southern literature--and some, notably Vanderbilt, Georgia, and Louisiana State, harbor what seem to be dozens of them. The University of North Carolina forms the epicenter of this phenomenon, and within its precincts resides the impressario and propelling dynamo
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