Southern Renaissance: An Outline
The Southern Literary Renaissance is commonly dated from the publication William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury in 1929 and is often explained by referring to the peculiar "historical consciousness" of this generation of writers (Wise, 146).
The Southern Renaissance was the revitalization of American southern literature that began in the 1920s and '30s with the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren.
Before this renaissance, southern writers tended to focus on historical romances about the "Lost Cause" of the South's Civil War defeat and the supposed idealic culture that existed before the war. Despite the fact that some southerners, such as African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt, dismissed this view as nostalgia by pointing out the racism and exploitation of blacks at that time, the belief in the South's Lost Cause was a driving force in southern literature until World War I.
The writers of the Southern Renaissance changed this by dealing with three major themes in their works. The first was the burden of history in a place where many people still remembered slavery, reconstruction, and a reflective military defeat. The second theme was to focus on the South's conservative culture, in particular on how an individual could exist without losing a sense of identity in a region where family; religion, and community were more greatly valued than one's personal and social life. The final theme that the renaissance writers approached was the South's troubled history with racial issues.
As a result of these writers' distance from the Civil War and slavery, they were able to bring more neutrality to writings about the South. They also brought new radical techniques such as stream of consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their works as Faulkner did.
