The Southern Renaissance

Name:
Instructor:
Course Title:
Date:
Classic English Literature – The Southern Renaissance
The Southern Renaissance
The Southern Renaissance was a historical moment where the Southern population made a rapid and a complex transition from their traditional and cultural forms to modern modes of life. In essence, this period marked a rapid transition and a socio-cultural upheaval to modern lifestyles. A vast majority of communities and southern populations relied less on agriculture and diversified into industrialization and other modern means of survival. The Southern Renaissance gave birth to a southern mentality referred broadly to as the ‘Southern Mind’. As postulated by W.J Cash in the book ‘The Southern Mind’, this was a perception held broadly by the Southern Populations (NAAL 1337). The southern mind was a mentality of continued oppression and the continuity of racial discrimination.
The Emergence of the Southern Gothic
A popular term strongly associated with the Southern Literature was the Southern Gothic. The southern gothic referred to nuance characterizations of war, violence, and discrimination within the borders of the Southern Literature. In a broader context, the popular Southern writers and cultural critics saw their role as advocating for their traumas, their suffering, and the violence that was being brewed in the south. The Southern Gothic acted as a medium through which this suffering could be translated as a popular discourse in the southern literature. Through the Southern Gothic, the southern people saw themselves as victims of war and thought themselves as less privileged.

They became victims of guilt, and therefore there was a strong resistance to change and conform to popular values held particularly by those outside the southern parts. As seen, the Southern people changed their culture and literature. The literature of the time focused majorly on issues of oppression, guilt, and abject poverty as opposed to addressing the issues outside the south.
The Southern Gothic Contributed to the Southern Mind
The Fugitive-Agrarian Movement was formed during the 1920s – 30s, and it encompassed artists that sought to shift the culture and literature of the southern populations and communities. These artists continuously sought for originality, specificity, and rootedness in their efforts to segregate the southern populations from the rest of the country. One of the intellectuals of the Southern Movement was T.S Elliot, who was first a poet and later a cultural critic. Elliot advocated for international modernism and sought to differentiate the southern culture from agriculture to industrialization. Indeed, the module reading quotes that, ’Elliot was a figurehead of international modernism and was a poet and a cultural critic, one of the first spark of southern modernism.’ (NAAL 1336). It should be noted that the elements of violence, oppression, and discrimination prevalent in the Southern Gothic and later in the southern literature gave rise to the Southern Mind; a mentality of guilt, war, and oppression. The dean poets of the Fugitive-Agrarian Movement embraced literature and a set of poems that would recognize their regional character and history as opposed to shifting their literal and cultural norms to the emerging modes of life. The module states that ‘at the end of the 1920s when their careers ended, the southern intellectuals organized themselves to resist what they termed as the imposition of a uniform and international culture and literature by the New Humanists.’ (NAAL 1336). To a greater extent, these poets sought to identify, recognize, and appreciate their unique traditions and histories of suffering, violence, and guilt, while still preserving their cultures within the borders of their artistic creations. And by doing this, they resisted the new cultures that were being imposed by the new humanists.
The module on Southern Modernism quotes that, ‘the Gothic work was a work of violence and pain and focused on the specifics of oppression, guilt, and pain that were common in the south.’ (NAAL 1339). These writers and poets recognized and appreciated the suffering they had gone through and consistently considered themselves and their people as the victims of racism, oppression, and discrimination prevalent in the Southern parts of the United States. These chief poets included: Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and John Ransom. In the late 1920s when the careers of these poets and artists warned, they reorganized themselves to resist the new modernism being advocated by a group of intellectuals and thinkers known as the New Humanists. Hence, this analysis supports that the Southern Gothic changed the Southern Literature. This Gothic enabled the Southern people to consider themselves as victims of guilt since most poets and cultural critics preserved these cultures and their unique histories in their artistic creations; books, poems, and literature (NAAL 1336). The perception of war, discrimination, and oppression was inscribed in the Southern Gothic, found its medium in the Southern Literature, and was later accepted and cemented as a mindset of oppression and segregation by the Southern populations.
Works Cited
NAAL. Module 4 – The Southern Renaissance: The Modern Period 1910-1945. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Pg. 1336 – Pg. 1340.