Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990

by Patricia Yaeger

The story of southern writing—the Dixie Limited, if you will—runs along an iron an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture.

For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it.

Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies.

The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory

342 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2000

Reviews

[Stephanie Graves · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’re looking for critical theory dealing with Southern Lit, especially women’s writing, or the Southern Gothic, I highly recommend Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire. It’s wonderful.

[Arthur Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Used a research paper about Flannery O'Connor as an excuse to read this. I really enjoy the writing style and want to search out more of Yeager's works

[Charles Michael Fischer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Along with Michael Kreyling's "Inventing Southern Literature," this is one of the most provocative and original critical studies of Southern Literature to date. It's refreshing to see narrowly-casted myths of the Southern writer--(i.e. Agrarian, Southern Renaissance-affiliated/influenced, white, bourbon-soaked males writing and responding to "intellectual" history(ies) of the South, etc.)--exploded and redefined to include writers who've been historically excluded or misread. As Yaeger argues throughout her book, for too many years, "Southern" has been conflated with "white/male," and has been pitched as a literature that is obsessed primarily with "community." Here is her pivotal response to this limiting notion that attempts to pigeonhole and marginalize "Southernness":

Yeager writes:

"Is Southern literature about family and community? Sometimes. But it is more likely to be about struggle, crisis, cultural emergence, and emergency" (44).

Yes!

This is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in Southern Literature.