Loving That Briar Patch: Southern Literature and Politics

U.S. Southern cultural criticism is marked by ideological, methodological, and pedagogical struggles over its referent and "true" object of study. All sides agree, however, that any reading of the South, its texts, its cultures, its history, must negotiate a tangle of stereotypes, myths, a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The global South 2007-01, Vol.1 (1), p.127-134
Main Author: Roberts, Diane
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
American literature
Hurricanes
Literature
Men
Novelists
Novels
Plantations
Slavery
Slaves
Stereotypes
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Summary:U.S. Southern cultural criticism is marked by ideological, methodological, and pedagogical struggles over its referent and "true" object of study. All sides agree, however, that any reading of the South, its texts, its cultures, its history, must negotiate a tangle of stereotypes, myths, and often-confusing performances. However, against this definitional murkiness the South has deployed a highly developed vocabulary of self-description in which gender roles, class positions, racial categories, and denominational differences are highly articulated. It is this tension between the conflicting impulses toward chaos and order that has always defined U.S. Southern literature and politics, a tension that the recent emergence of globalization has only exacerbated.
ISSN:1932-8648
1932-8656
DOI:10.2979/GSO.2007.1.1.127