Rough South, Rural South: Region and Class in Recent Southern Literature
Rough South, Rural South: Region and Class in Recent Southern Literature
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Abstract
This book describes and discusses the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education: Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Brad Watson, Daniel Woodrell, and Steve Yarbrough. Their twenty-first-century colleagues are Wiley Cash, Peter Farris, Skip Horack, Michael Farris Smith, Barb Johnson, and Jesmyn Ward. The book starts by distinguishing Rough South writers from such writers as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Younger writers who followed Harry Crews were born into and write about the Rough South. These writers undercut stereotypes, forcing readers to see the working poor differently. Other chapters begin with those on Crews and Cormac McCarthy, major influences on an entire generation. Later chapters address members of both groups—the self-educated and the college-educated. Both groups share a clear understanding of the value of working-class southerners.
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Front Matter
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“Rough South”: Beginnings
Gary Hawkins
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From “The Rise of Southern Redneck and White Trash Writers”1
Erik Bledsoe
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Harry Crews: Progenitor
David K. Jeffrey
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Elevated above the Real: The Poor White Southerner in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels
Marcus Hamilton
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Tim McLaurin: Universality from Rural North Carolina
bes Stark Spangler
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Larry Brown: A Firefighter Finds His Voice
Joe Samuel Starnes
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Dorothy Allison: Revising the “White Trash” Narrative
Emily Langhorne
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A World Almost Rotten: The Fiction of William Gay1
William Giraldi
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“Recover the Paths”: Salvage in Tom Franklin’s Fiction
Joan Wylie Hall
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The Rough South of Ron Rash
Thomas Ærvold Bjerre
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“Everything Worth Doing Hurts Like Hell”: The Rough South of Tim Gautreaux
L. Lamar Nisly
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Education Is Everything: Chris Offutt’s Eastern Kentucky
Peter Farris
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Daniel Woodrell, Ozarker
Shawn E. Miller
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Kaye Gibbons: Tough Women in a Rough South
Rebecca Godwin
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Lee Smith: A Diamond from the Rough
Linda Byrd Cook
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A Country for Old Men: The South of Clyde Edgerton’s Early Novels
Robert Donahoo
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Jill McCorkle: The Rough South from One Remove
Barbara Bennett
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“The Spiritual Energy of the Trees”: Nature, Place, and Religion in Silas House’s Crow County Trilogy
Scott Hamilton Suter
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Steve Yarbrough: Transplanted Mississippian
Thomas E. Dasher
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Once a Paradise: Brad Watson’s Southern Afterlife
Wade Newhouse
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Twenty-First-Century Writers: The Rural Southern Tradition Continues
Jean W. Cash
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Trash or Treasure? Images of the Hardscrabble South in Twenty-First-Century Film
Richard Gaughran
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End Matter
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