The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction

by Martyn Bone

For generations, southern novelists and critics have grappled with a concept that is widely seen as a trademark of their a strong attachment to geography, or a "sense of place." In the 1930s, the Agrarians accorded special meaning to rural life, particularly the farm, in their definitions of southern identity. For them, the South seemed an organic and rooted region in contrast to the North, where real estate development and urban sprawl evoked a faceless, raw capitalism. By the end of the twentieth century, however, economic and social forces had converged to create a modernized South. How have writers responded to this phenomenon? Is there still a sense of place in the South, or perhaps a distinctly postsouthern sense of place?
Martyn Bone innovatively draws upon postmodern thinking to consider the various perspectives that southern writers have brought to the concept of "place" and to look at its fate in a national and global context. He begins with a revisionist assessment of the Agrarians, who failed in their attempts to turn their proprietary ideal of the small farm into actual policy but whose broader rural aesthetic lived on in the work of neo-Agrarian writers, including William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. By the 1950s, adherence to this aesthetic was causing southern writers and critics to lose sight of the social reality of a changing South.
Bone turns to more recent works that do respond to the impact of capitalist spatial development on the South -- and on the nation generally -- including that self-declared "international city" Atlanta. Close readings of novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Anne Rivers Siddons, Tom Wolfe, and Toni Cade Bambara illuminate evolving ideas about capital, land, labor, and class while introducing southern literary studies into wider debates around social, cultural, and literary geography. Bone concludes his remarkably rich book by considering works of Harry Crews and Barbara Kingsolver that suggest the southern sense of place may be not only post-Agrarian or postsouthern but also transnational.

Genres: Nonfiction

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Martyn Bone is assistant professor of American literature at the Institute for English, German, and Romance Languages at the University of Copenhagen. His previous publications include The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction.

Reviews

[Preston Scott Blakeley · Rating 4 out of 5]

For thesis. I’ll be returning.

[Rod Annis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was too academic for me. I tend to be a very shallow thinker, thinking far more broadly than deeply--And that is being gracious to myself, God bless my heart. Raised by a southern belle mama (I love biscuits, grits, pecan pie and say, "Yes ma'am," sometimes to my Yankee wife, who then slaps me for being a smart ass, which I wasn't) I thought I understood southern culture just a smidgen. But alas I didn't realize that southern culture was gone because we ain't got no mo' Tara. All we got is football. Roll Tide! Nor did I realize that Atlanta was the hallmark of southern cities. Dang, I thought it was a Yankee city masquerading as southern. Did I hear Marty say Atlanta wanted to be the Chicago or NYC of the south? No respectable southerner I know would ever in a hundred years say something like that. "Be like Chicago or NYC" uh uh). When I finally figured it out though, that he wasn't really trying to understand the south, but select literature in the south, it made much more sense. The political-economic perspective--"Oh, I see what you're trying to say." We ain't agrarian anymo'. OK. I live in B'ham, and yep, no farms until you get to Shelby County. Now if you are a Yankee, and ya want to understand the south, in all its wrongness (and by golly we got pockets full of wrongness), read Faulkner. And dang if he ain't hard to understand too, sometimes.