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The Return of the Rural in Twenty-First Century Southern Literature

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The Return of the Rural in Twenty-First Century Southern Literature The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Dissertations Summer 2019 Beyond Postsouthern: The Return of the Rural in Twenty-First Century Southern Literature Jeremy Ryan Gibbs University of Southern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Gibbs, Jeremy Ryan, "Beyond Postsouthern: The Return of the Rural in Twenty-First Century Southern Literature" (2019). Dissertations. 1699. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/1699 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BEYOND POSTSOUTHERN: THE RETURN OF THE RURAL IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SOUTHERN LITERATURE by Jeremy Gibbs A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School, the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Humanities at The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved by: Dr. Kate Cochran, Committee Chair Dr. Sherita L. Johnson Dr. Charles Sumner Dr. Monika Gehlawat ____________________ ____________________ ____________________ Dr. Kate Cochran Dr. Luis A. Iglesias Dr. Karen S. Coats Committee Chair Director of School Dean of the Graduate School August 2019 COPYRIGHT BY Jeremy Gibbs 2019 Published by the Graduate School ABSTRACT This dissertation analyzes how twenty-first century southern literature employs rurality as a means of critiquing the dominant neoliberal impulse of an increasingly urban-attuned society. In times of transition, southern literature has traditionally turned to representations of rurality in order to understand, navigate, or resist change; rapid globalization has influenced contemporary writers to return to the rural in their fiction in order to expose manifestations of the urban/rural hierarchy and offer alternatives to a prevailing urban consciousness. This study’s Introduction discusses ways in which pastoral and anti-pastoral literary modes have framed rurality in southern fiction, specifically through depictions of the plantation South as an idyllic paradise in ante- and postbellum fiction and depictions of depleted landscapes as sites of abjection in Depression-era fiction. Contemporary writers employ aspects of both modes in their descriptions of rural landscapes and lives. Chapter II reveals how in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, the privacy afforded by the rural landscape leads to conservatism as a political and a moral stance and a limited individual perspective, all of which contribute to the widespread acceptance of the institution of slavery in the antebellum South. In Chapter III, the effects of natural disaster on rural dwellers are shown to reveal not only racial and rural discrimination but also tenacious beliefs in fate and superstition in Bill Cheng’s Southern Cross the Dog. Chapter IV examines how Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! exposes the constructed-ness of rural identities and demonstrates how rural locations and identities can both be sites of resistance to land development and capitalism. Chapter V discusses how agribusiness contributes to material and existential alienation in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox. This chapter also argues that true ii intersubjective community is easier to attain in rural areas than urban areas. Each of these works includes both positive and negative perspectives on rurality, demonstrating that the way in which rurality is narrated in literature can underscore its value in the modern world. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Kate Cochran, my committee chair, for all her wisdom, feedback, and assistance throughout the process of writing this dissertation. I would also like to thank all the members of my dissertation committee: Dr. Sherita L. Johnson, Dr. Charles Sumner, and Dr. Monika Gehlawat for their helpful direction after my prospectus defense and throughout the course of my Ph.D. work. iv DEDICATION To my mom, Natalie Gibbs, who instilled in me a love of reading and who believed in me every step of the way, and my dad, Jeff Gibbs, who taught me how to work hard and persevere. And to Alissa Gibbs, my constant source of support and encouragement throughout the journey. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iv DEDICATION .................................................................................................................... v CHAPTER I – INTRODUCTION: RURALITY AND THE PASTORAL MODE IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE.............................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER II – NARRATING THE RURAL EXPERIENCE OF SLAVERY IN EDWARD P. JONES’S THE KNOWN WORLD .............................................................. 22 CHAPTER III – SURVIVAL AND THE RURAL BLUES IN BILL CHENG’S SOUTHERN CROSS THE DOG ....................................................................................... 58 CHAPTER IV – CULTURAL APPROPRIATION AS RESISTANCE TO URBANITY IN KAREN RUSSELL’S SWAMPLANDIA! .................................................................... 93 CHAPTER V – AGRIBUSINESS, ALIENATION, AND COMMUNITY IN CYNTHIA SHEARER’S THE CELESTIAL JUKEBOX ................................................................... 123 CHAPTER VI – CODA .................................................................................................. 160 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 167 vi CHAPTER I – INTRODUCTION: RURALITY AND THE PASTORAL MODE IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE “The South” and “southern literature” have been inextricably linked to a “sense of place,” both in academic discourse and in the popular imagination. This sense of place has typically coincided with assumptions about the land, from Thomas Jefferson’s descriptions of a South comprised of lush rural landscapes filled with a catalogue of natural resources in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782) to the Nashville Agrarians’ portrayals of the southern family farm as the last bastion against northern industrialization in I’ll Take My Stand (1930). That perspective is only true for white southern authors writing throughout the history of southern literature, for whom the conception of southern “place” has often been associated with the traditional pastoral and accompanied by a narrative of decline: idyllic rural landscapes and virtues are being displaced by decadent urban sprawl and vice. Yet the pastoral is not the only mode in which southern writers have used rurality in southern literature; writers have used a variety of conceptions of rurality to help define the region. Differing viewpoints about the land have rendered different kinds of southern literature. For example, John Pendleton Kennedy’s idealized pastoral plantation in Swallow Barn (1832) bears little resemblance to Erskine Caldwell’s anti-pastoral, abject, barren farm in Tobacco Road (1932); however, both of these novels define the South in terms of rurality. In the latter half of the twentieth century, some southern writers turned away from writing about the rural South (and in some cases, from writing about the South at all) in what has been identified 1 as a “postsouthern” turn.1 Yet now, many contemporary writers have once again begun to explore southern rurality in their works. Even though the southern literary canon is sometimes understood to be white, the literature examined in this dissertation contests that understanding, as well as the previous assumptions about southern rurality. This dissertation explores how twenty-first century southern literary representations of rurality are influenced by changes in contemporary society, focusing on four representative novels: Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003), Bill Cheng’s Southern Cross the Dog (2013), Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (2011), and Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox (2004). These novels engage with rurality as a means critiquing the dominant, urban-based neoliberal impulse of global culture today. Since the early twentieth century, rural areas have undergone a series of rapid transformations. In North America, food production has almost completely been overtaken by agribusiness, and as a result, small family farms that once proliferated in the countryside have now become exceptional. These changes to the rural landscape are due, at least in part, to neoliberalism, the late-capitalist idea that privatization, deregulation, and free trade encourage more productivity and profit. According to Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy, “neoliberalism is broadly defined as the extension of competitive markets into all areas of life, including the economy, politics, and society” 1 According to his entry in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 9 (2008), George Hovis defines “postsouthern literature” as the term used for work that “(1) describes a place and culture that is no longer distinctively southern (or that calls into question traditional assumptions about southern culture) and/or (2) exhibits a sensibility fundamentally different from the preceding literature of the
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