In Friends of Bill F.: Alcohol, Recovery, and Social Progress in Southern Fiction, I argue that many southern writers use the trope of drunkenness to investigate the Souths often hesitant stance toward social change. The overwhelming presence of hard drinking in southern fiction is so ubiquitous that it becomes nearly invisible, and what distinguishes twentieth century southern literary representations of alcohol from their antecedents is how overconsumption reflects a dis-ease in both the individual drinker and the region as a whole. Emerging from the concept of diseased drinking is the idea of recovery, and by foregrounding recovery language alongside depictions of addiction, these texts privilege drinking-recovery as the metaphor through which to signify how southerners confronted progress. My intervention into the discourse of the South and modernity traces the literary contours of alcoholism alongside the emerging Sobriety Movement that became popularized with the rise of Alcoholics Anonymous, to suggest that recovery from alcoholism perhaps anticipates individual and social progress. I argue that progress remained conceptually problematic for writers like William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Cormac McCarthy who saw the Souths tepid relationship to social change as hypocritical.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-04092013-103115 |
| Date | 12 April 2013 |
| Creators | Picken, Conor Adam |
| Contributors | Stauffer, Suzanne, May, John R., Moreland, Rick, Costello, Brannon |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04092013-103115/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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