The response of white Southern writers to the movement for black civil rights in the 1960s is perhaps best examined in the context of two intertwining Southern traditions: one, a belief in the South as a new Garden of Eden, where generous, honorable, easy-going Southerners enjoyed a way of life vastly superior to that of the driven, avaricious inhabitants of the industrial, urban North; and two, the tradition of separation of the races and the relegation of all black Southerners to underclass status. An examination of Southern writers from John Pendleton Kennedy through the Agrarians reveals the attempts to reconcile the two traditions, largely by insisting that the paternalism of white Southern aristocrats incorporated African Americans into the Southern family. / However, even in the Old South paradise imagined by Kennedy and Thomas Nelson Page, whites' fear of blacks and their consciousness of being surrounded by an alien people undermined the South's pastoral image. Writers like Mark Twain and George Washington Cable dealt openly with the evil of slavery, but they also left the South. It was William Faulkner who brought the tension between loyalty to the Southern way of life and guilt over the treatment of Southern blacks to the surface as he explored the myth of the South as the New Eden and its Fall as a result of slavery. / Thus, white Southern writers of the civil rights era--of which William Styron, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy are representative--found themselves under the shadow of both Faulkner's reputation and the racial dilemma of the South. They resisted the label of Southern writer but found that their Southern identity was not so easily discarded. Remaining loyal to the Southern way of life, these writers identified community, not racial segregation, as the defining quality of that life and alienation between the races, not integration, as the real threat to the South. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-04, Section: A, page: 0963. / Major Professor: Anne E. Rowe. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77130 |
| Contributors | Dillard, Gail Presley., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 389 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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