The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction - Paperback

by Martyn Bone (Author)

For generations, southern novelists and critics have grappled with a concept that is widely seen as a trademark of their literature: 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.

Back Jacket

"Martyn Bone presents fresh and evocative close readings of capitalist property relations in the fiction of contemporary southern writers, and the concept of the postsouthern gives it its heady theoretical buzz, one that will no doubt influence future studies." -- American Literature

"Bone makes a welcome contribution to the field of southern literary studies by demonstrating how newer critical theories of place can illuminate southern literature.... [He] combines a sophisticated theoretical discussion with convincing close readings." -- Journal of American Studies

In this innovative book, Martyn Bone explores perspectives of the southern "sense of place" and examines it in a national and global context. Bone assesses work of Neo-Agrarian writers William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, as well as more recent responses to the impact of capitalist spatial development on the South -- including the self-declared "international city" of Atlanta. His scrutiny of novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Anne Rivers Siddons, Tom Wolfe, and Toni Cade Bambara reveal ideas about capital, land, labor, and class while introducing southern literary studies into a wider debate. Bone concludes with works of Harry Crews and Barbara Kingsolver that suggest the southern sense of place may not be only southern, but diversely transnational.

Author Biography

Martyn Bone is associate professor of American literature and head of the Center for Transnational American Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He is also the editor of Perspectives on Barry Hannah, as well as the coeditor of The American South in the Atlantic World and Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South.