Author | Mark G. Malvasi |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Publisher | Louisiana State University Press |
Publication date | 1997 |
Pages | 261 |
ISBN | 9780807121436 |
The Unregenerate South: Agrarian Thought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Donald Davidson is a 1997 book by Mark G. Malvasi.
The book surveys the social thought of the Southern American writers John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Donald Davidson. They were associated with the English department at Vanderbilt University and participated in the short-lived Southern Agrarians movement, which in 1930 produced the manifesto I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Malvasi argues that the three writers expressed a cohesive "Southern conservative tradition", which existed before them and amounted to defending community, leisure and tradition against the perceived threats of bourgeois individualism, the rule of profit and progress. [1]
John Grammer wrote in the Mississippi Quarterly that the book is measured and thereby differs from much earlier material about the Southern Agrarians, which either is written out of loyalty or hostility. [1] Joseph Persky wrote in The American Historical Review that Malvasi broadens the understanding of the social thought of its subjects, stressing the contrast between the rural culture they praised and the urban and academic milieus that shaped their own aesthetics, but wrote that "the whole remains a good deal less than the sum of the parts". [2]
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.
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.
Donald Grady Davidson was an American poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author. An English professor at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1965, he was a founding member of the Fugitives and the overlapping group Southern Agrarians, two literary groups based in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a supporter of segregation in the United States.
Stark Young was an American teacher, playwright, novelist, painter, literary critic, translator, and essayist.
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.
John Orley Allen Tate, known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and poet laureate from 1943 to 1944.
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 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.
Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as an intellectual historian, political philosopher, and a mid-20th century conservative and as an authority on modern rhetoric. Weaver was briefly a socialist during his youth, a lapsed leftist intellectual, a teacher of composition, a Platonist philosopher, cultural critic, and a theorist of human nature and society.
The Southern Renaissance was the reinvigoration of American Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s with the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Caroline Gordon, Margaret Mitchell, Katherine Anne Porter, Erskine Caldwell, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others.
Brainard Cheney was an American novelist, playwright, speechwriter and essayist from Georgia who was associated with the Southern Agrarians literary movement
Mary Louise Cowan was an American critic and teacher, and wife of the physicist and University of Dallas president Donald Cowan. She taught at Texas Christian University and Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. Cowan lived in Dallas, where she taught at both at the University of Dallas and the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. She was a prominent figure in Dallas society as a mentor and friend to many Dallas dignitaries and as one of the city's leading intellectuals.
Lyle H. Lanier was an American experimental psychologist and writer.
Edwin Mims (1872–1959) was an American university professor of English literature. He served as the chair of the English Department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, for thirty years from 1912 to 1942, and he taught many members of the Fugitives and the Southern Agrarians, two literary movements in the South. He was a staunch opponent of lynching and a practicing Methodist.
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.
Traditionalist conservatism in the United States is a political, social philosophy and variant of conservatism. While classical conservatism has been largely based on the philosophy and writings of Aristotle, Edmund Burke, and Joseph de Maistre, the American variant has been influenced by thinkers such as John Adams and Russel Kirk.
Thomas Daniel Young was an American academic. He was the first Gertrude C. Vanderbilt professor of English at Vanderbilt University, and the author or editor of a dozen books about the literature of the Southern United States.
Jesse Ely Wills (1899–1977) was an American businessman and poet. He was the chairman of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company and the author of four poetry collections. National Life was founded by his father, William Ridley Wills in 1902. Jesse Wills began working there at age 23 when he was a student at Vanderbilt University and remained with the company his entire career. In 1925, the company created radio station WSM to help promote their business and built a studio on the fifth floor of their building. National Life Insurance and station WSM achieved international recognition in creating the "Grand Ole Opry " which was broadcast nationwide and became the longest-running radio broadcast in U.S. history.