Southern literature
Below Mason-Dixon writing
Southern literature is writing by or about the American South, typically exploring themes of place, history, family, race, and regional identity.
The tradition encompasses work from antebellum plantation narratives through the Southern Gothic of Faulkner and O'Connor to contemporary voices.
She's teaching a course on Southern literature this semester.
The genre often features distinctive dialect, a sense of the past's weight on the present, and tensions between tradition and change.
- FaulknerAmerican modernist author
- antebellumBefore a war's start
- plantation houseGrand home on farmland
- raceCompetition of speed
- Spanish mossEpiphytic Southern plant
Reconstruction · lost cause · Hurston · identity · Twain · dialects · agrarianism · Morrison · oral tradition · front porch · family · segregation · Civil War · O'Connor · Bible Belt · Jim Crow · small town · folklore
- American LiteratureThe Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Moby Dick
- literary criticismclose reading, New Criticism, criticism, formalism, structuralism
- race literatureHarlem Renaissance, slave narratives, racial themes, minority voices, racial identity
- Southern HistoryAntebellum, Dixie, Confederate, Confederacy, Jim Crow
- Alice WalkerThe Color Purple, womanism
Southern literaturescience fiction
Speculative fiction with technological themes
southern, literature, south, southerly, southward, southerner, southernmost, literal, literary