The emergence of a new critical spirit
The Southern Renaissance in the 1920s had been preceded by a long period after the Civil War during which Southern literature was dominated by writers who supported the Lost Cause. Yet the critical spirit that characterized the Southern Renaissance did have roots in the era that preceded it.
From the 1880s onwards, a few white Southern authors, such as George Washington Cable and Mark Twain (considered a Southern writer because he grew up in the slave state of Missouri and set many of his writings in the South) challenged readers by pointing out the exploitation of blacks and ridiculing other Southern conventions of the time.
In the 1890s, the writings of journalist Walter Hines Page and academics William Peterfield Trent and John Spencer Bassett severely criticized the cultural and intellectual mediocrity of the men who held power in the South. In 1903, Basset, an academic at Trinity College (later Duke University) angered many influential white Southerners when he called African-American leader Booker T. Washington "the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in a hundred years." [2]
The most comprehensive and outspoken criticisms directed against the tenets of the "Lost Cause" before the First World War were put forth by African-American writers who grew up in the South, most famously by Charles W. Chesnutt in his novels The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901). [3] However, before the 1970s, African-American authors from the South were not considered part of Southern literature by the white and mostly male authors and critics who considered themselves the main creators and guardians of the Southern literary tradition.
The Southern Renaissance was the first significant literary movement in the Southern United States that responded to longstanding critiques of the region's intellectual and cultural stagnation. These critiques came from both within the Southern literary tradition and from external commentators, most notably H. L. Mencken. In his 1917 essay "The Sahara of the Bozart," Mencken famously criticized the South as the most intellectually barren region in the U.S., asserting that its cultural life had been in decline since the Civil War. The Southern Renaissance sought to counter these views. [4] This created a storm of protest from within conservative circles in the South. However, many emerging Southern writers who were already highly critical of contemporary life in the South were emboldened by Mencken's essay. On the other hand, Mencken's subsequent bitter attacks on aspects of Southern culture that they valued amazed and horrified them. In response to the attacks of Mencken and his imitators, Southern writers were provoked to a reassertion of Southern uniqueness and a deeper exploration of the theme of Southern identity. [5]
The Western canon is the embodiment of high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly cherished across the Western hemisphere, such works having achieved the status of classics.
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature but also includes literature produced in languages other than English.
The Southern Agrarians were twelve American Southerners who wrote an agrarian literary manifesto in 1930. They and their essay collection, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, contributed to the Southern Renaissance, the reinvigoration of Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s. They were based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. John Crowe Ransom was their unofficial leader, though Robert Penn Warren became their most prominent member. The membership overlaps with The Fugitives.
John Crowe Ransom was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist. He was nominated for the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature.
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
Cleanth Brooks was an American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education. His best-known works, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) and Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), argue for the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a way of understanding poetry. With his writing, Brooks helped to formulate formalist criticism, emphasizing "the interior life of a poem" and codifying the principles of close reading.
The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois (editor), Oswald Garrison Villard, J. Max Barber, Charles Edward Russell, Kelly Miller, William Stanley Braithwaite, and Mary Dunlop Maclean. The Crisis has been in continuous print since 1910, and it is the oldest Black-oriented magazine in the world. Today, The Crisis is "a quarterly journal of civil rights, history, politics and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color."
Négritude is a framework of critique and literary theory, mainly developed by francophone intellectuals, writers, and politicians in the African diaspora during the 1930s, aimed at raising and cultivating "black consciousness" across Africa and its diaspora. Négritude gathers writers such as sisters Paulette and Jeanne Nardal, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Abdoulaye Sadji, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Négritude intellectuals disavowed colonialism, racism and Eurocentrism. They promoted African culture within a framework of persistent Franco-African ties. The intellectuals employed Marxist political philosophy, in the black radical tradition. The writers drew heavily on a surrealist literary style, and some say they were also influenced somewhat by the Surrealist stylistics, and in their work often explored the experience of diasporic being, asserting one's self and identity, and ideas of home, home-going and belonging.
The Fugitives, also known as the Fugitive Poets, is the name given to a group of poets and literary scholars at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who published a literary magazine from 1922 to 1925 called The Fugitive. The group, primarily driven by Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate, formed a major school of twentieth century poetry in the United States. With it, a major period of modern Southern literature began. Their poetry was formal and featured traditional prosody and concrete imagery often from experiences of the rural south. The group has some overlap with two later movements: Southern Agrarians and New Criticism.
Southern United States literature consists of American literature written about the Southern United States or by writers from the region. Literature written about the American South first began during the colonial era, and developed significantly during and after the period of slavery in the United States. Traditional historiography of Southern United States literature emphasized a unifying history of the region; the significance of family in the South's culture, a sense of community and the role of the individual, justice, the dominance of Christianity and the positive and negative impacts of religion, racial tensions, social class and the usage of local dialects. However, in recent decades, the scholarship of the New Southern Studies has decentralized these conventional tropes in favor of a more geographically, politically, and ideologically expansive "South" or "Souths".
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Andrew Nelson Lytle was an American novelist, dramatist, essayist and professor of literature.
The culture of the Southern United States, Southern culture, or Southern heritage, is a subculture of the United States. From its many cultural influences, the South developed its own unique customs, dialects, arts, literature, cuisine, dance, and music. The combination of its unique history and the fact that many Southerners maintain—and even nurture—an identity separate from the rest of the country has led to it being one of the most studied and written-about regions of the United States.
American modernism, much like the modernism movement in general, is a trend of philosophical thought arising from the widespread changes in culture and society in the age of modernity. American modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States beginning at the turn of the 20th century, with a core period between World War I and World War II. Like its European counterpart, American modernism stemmed from a rejection of Enlightenment thinking, seeking to better represent reality in a new, more industrialized world.
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.
Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition is a compilation of literary and cultural works that originated from call and response patterns in African and African-American cultural traditions. The 1997 anthology includes works representing the centuries-long emergence of this distinctly Black literary and cultural aesthetic in fiction, poetry, drama, essays, sermons, speeches, criticism, journals, and song lyrics from spirituals to rap. Writings ranging from Queen Latifah to Phyllis Wheatley and LeRoi Jones are included within this volume. This anthology asserts that these various artistic forms comprise a Black aesthetic.
Jules Chametzky was an American literary critic, writer, editor, and unionist. His essays in the 1960s and 1970s on the importance of race, ethnicity, class, and gender to American literary culture anticipated the later schools of New Historicism and Cultural Studies in American letters.
The Double Dealer was a short-lived but influential New-Orleans–based literary journal of the 1920s.
The American Review was a magazine of politics and literature established by the fascist publisher Seward Collins in 1933. There were 71 issues published, containing articles, editorials, notes, and reviews, before the journal ceased operations in October 1937.
