Details

Subject(s)

• American literature—Southern States—History and criticism [Browse]
• Authors, American—Southern States—History [Browse]
• Poor white people in literature [Browse]
• White people in literature [Browse]
• Southern States—In literature [Browse]
• Literature and society—United States—History [Browse]
• American literature—20th century—History and criticism [Browse]

Series

Cambridge studies in American literature and culture ; 190. [More in this series]

Summary note

Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature explores the role that representations of poor white people play in shaping both middle-class American identity and major American literary movements and genres across the long twentieth century. Jolene Hubbs reveals that, more often than not, poor white characters imagined by middle-class writers embody what better-off people are anxious to distance themselves from in a given moment. Poor white southerners are cast as social climbers during the status-conscious Gilded Age, country rubes in the modern era, racist obstacles to progress during the civil rights struggle, and junk food devotees in the health-conscious 1990s. Hubbs illuminates how Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, and Barbara Robinette Moss swam against these tides, pioneering formal innovations with an eye to representing poor white characters in new ways.

Notes

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Dec 2022).

Contents

• Introduction: Poor White Southerners In The American Imaginary
• Riffraff And Half-Strainers: Charles W. Chesnutt And Regionalism
• Slow, Sweating, Stinking Bumpkins: William Faulkner And Modernism
• Civil Rights And Uncivil Whites: Flannery O'conner And Southern Women's Midcentury Writing
• Hungry Women And Horny Men: Dorothy Allison, Barbara Robinette Moss And Grit Lit
• Coda.

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ISBN

9781009250627 (ebook)

Statement on language in description

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