Journal article
Introduction: The New Southern Studies and the New Modernist Studies
Philological quarterly, Vol.90(2/3), pp.125-136
03/22/2011
Abstract
Beginning with the postmortem commentaries on modernism that appeared in the 1960s, scholars began reconsidering the shape and meaning of the high modernist literary canon.4 The ensuing decades brought overlapping challenges from feminist, African American, postcolonial, and cultural studies scholars that resulted in what we might call a new modernist consensus.5 That consensus adopted on the one hand innovative interpretive approaches that redefined our understanding of canonical white male writers. [...] Cheryl Herr examined Joyces dynamic dialogue with popular culture; Michael North showed that Eliot might be read profitably in light of an interracial vernacular; and Lawrence Rainey teased out the entrepreneurial aspects of modernist self-promotion.6 On the other hand, the new modernist consensus also altered the discipline in another, arguably more controversial, manner by directing their attention to writers who for reasons of race, gender, sexuality, ideology, and popular acclaim had received little or no critical attention.7 Recent work by Mary Lou Emery on Caribbean dramatist Una Marson, William Maxwell on African American writing of the 1920s and 1930s, and Michael Szalay on white sentimental novelist Betty Smith well illustrates this change.8 Southern studies lacks a long history of revisionist critique. [...] the early 1990s, few scholars working on Southern literature found objectionable a notion of regional literary value that excluded African American literature and queer literatures, let alone writing from the Caribbean, Central, and South America.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Introduction: The New Southern Studies and the New Modernist Studies
- Creators
- Harilaos Stecopoulos
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Philological quarterly, Vol.90(2/3), pp.125-136
- Publisher
- University of Iowa, Philological Quarterly
- ISSN
- 0031-7977
- eISSN
- 2169-5342
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 03/22/2011
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984397930002771
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