East Baton Rouge Parish Library

The postsouthern sense of place in contemporary fiction, Martyn Bone

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages [255]-268) and index

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

index present

non fiction

The postsouthern sense of place in contemporary fiction

bibliography

56491033

Martyn Bone

"Martyn Bone draws upon postmodern thinking to consider the various perspectives that southern writers have brought to the concept of 'place' and to look at its fate in a national and global context. He begins with a revisionist assessment of the Agrarians, who failed in their attempts to turn their proprietary ideal of the small farm into actual policy but whose broader rural aesthetic lived on in the work of neo-Agrarian writers, including William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. By the 1950s, adherence to this aesthetic was causing southern writers and critics to lose sight of the social reality of a changing South

Southern literary studies

Bone turns to more recent works that do respond to the impact of capitalist spatial development on the South -- and on the nation generally -- including that self-declared 'international city' Atlanta. Bone concludes his book by considering works of Harry Crews and Barbara Kingsolver that suggest the southern sense of place may be not only post-Agrarian or postsouthern but also transnational"--BOOK JACKET

Part 1. Capital, land, and place from agrarianism to postsouthernism. Not a mere real estate development : capital, land, and the agrarians' proprietary ideal ; (Re)inventing the (post)southern sense of place -- Part 2. The postsouthern turn : Warren, Percy, Ford, and the redevelopment of place. Toward a postsouthern sense of place : Robert Penn Warren's A place to come to and Walker Percy's The moviegoer ; Neo-Faulknerism or postsouthernism? : labor, parody, and the problem of place in Richard Ford's A piece of my heart ; Land and literary speculations : the postsouthern world-as-text in Richard Ford's The sportswriter ; New Jersey real estate and the postsouthern sense of place : Richard Ford's Independence day -- Part 3. Placing the postsouthern international city : the Atlanta conundrum. Locating a nonplace : Atlanta's absence from Southern literature and the emergence of a postsouthern international city ; Urban renewal and mixed-use developments : place and race in Anne Rivers Siddons's Peachtree road and Downtown ; Placing the postsouthern international city : Atlanta in Tom Wolfe's A man in full ; Capitalist abstraction and the body politics of place : Toni Cade Bambara's Those bones are not my child -- Epilogue: Against the agrarian grain, taking the transnational turn