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THE UNITED STATES SOUTH AND LITERARY STUDIES DURING THE COLD WAR By JORDAN J. DOMINY A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2011 1 © 2011 Jordan J. Dominy 2 To Jessica Peek Dominy 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Coming from rural Georgia, I speak with an accent that once led a student of mine to interrupt one of my lectures with the question, “I’m sorry, but where are you from?” For this reason and others, I did not see myself writing a dissertation focusing on southern literature. While I enjoyed reading southern authors, as a new graduate student actually researching and writing about them did not cross my mind right away. I suppose subconsciously I worried that if I pursued its study I would become the real-life walking, talking stereotype of the southern scholar, accent and all. However, the community of scholars that I am grateful to be a part of at the University of Florida helped me to see a place where I could make a needed, and what I hope is, a useful intervention in southern studies. I thank my advisor, Susan Hegeman, for being an encouraging and supportive teacher. She provided valuable feedback from our very first conversations about potential dissertation projects and pointed me in the new directions southern studies is taking. Also helpful early in the project was Phillip Wegner, one of my readers, whose seminar first got me thinking a lot about late modernism. I also thank Marsha Bryant and William Link, also readers on my committee, for taking an interest in my project and providing their feedback on it at various stages of the process. My research in the Lillian Smith Papers for this project was my first foray into archival research. Given the sheer amount of material in the Smith collection, half the battle was determining the best strategy for working my way through items ranging from invoices to personal correspondence. Florence Turcotte of the Department of Special and Area Studies Collections in the Smathers Libraries here at the University of Florida 4 aided in that strategizing. She also provided advice on working with and the citing the collection; I thank her for her assistance. Moreover, my studies in graduate school and work on this particular project have been supported by individuals who have been caring, reassuring colleagues and even better friends. Some have read drafts of chapters; many have talked with me about my project and shared professional advice; and most have had to listen while I droned endlessly about it. I owe deepest thanks to Wesley Beal, Amber Pearson, Gordon Johnston, Christina Van Houten, Patrick McHenry, Regina Martin, Mike Mayne, David Austin, Sara Austin, Jim Liner, and David Davis. In what I am sure was a burdensome labor of love, my brother, Kyle, proofread the first complete drafts of this project as I was preparing it for defense. I thank him and his wife, Lana, for their love and the time they spent helping to make this project better. I also thank my parents, Tom and Karen, who put a book in my hand from an early age. It probably seems to them that I never put it down, but it is because of their cultivation of my curiosity about words and language that my life has taken the course it has. I owe many thanks, as well, to my in-laws, Leon, Sandy, Eric, and Melanie, for their support and interest in my project, which they have lovingly termed “the white pages.” My greatest debt of gratitude is owed to Jessica: my best friend, my partner, my fellow traveler—no one has been more supportive of my career. I thank her for allowing this project to be a sojourn in the voyage we share together. I look forward to many more adventures with her. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................... 4 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .............................................................................................. 8 ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... 9 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: WE HAVE NEVER BEEN SOUTHERN .................................... 11 2 REVIEWING THE SOUTH ...................................................................................... 28 Matters of Region .................................................................................................... 33 Matters of Race ....................................................................................................... 42 Matters of War ......................................................................................................... 49 Matters of Canon ..................................................................................................... 60 3 SOUTHERN STUDIES AS AREA STUDIES ........................................................... 64 Imagining a Renascence ......................................................................................... 71 Blowing Smoke ........................................................................................................ 80 Faulkner as “Faulkner” ............................................................................................. 88 4 LATE MODERNIST AESTHETICS AND THE FUNCTION OF LITERARY PRIZES .................................................................................................................... 91 Warren, Ellison, and the Vital Center ....................................................................... 93 Of Prizes and Politics ............................................................................................. 103 Southern Honor, American Values ........................................................................ 110 Democratic Discrepancies ..................................................................................... 119 Receiving the Torch ............................................................................................... 125 5 WRITING THE UNIVERSAL AS AMERICAN ........................................................ 129 Good Country People are Americans, Too ............................................................ 135 But Not Displaced Persons .................................................................................... 146 “I Don’t Consider That I Write About the South” .................................................... 161 6 RED STATES AND BLUE STATES ...................................................................... 165 Strategies, Southern or Otherwise ......................................................................... 171 Revolution Gets Personal ...................................................................................... 177 Paradise and Its Malcontents ................................................................................ 193 6 APPENDIX: THE CORRESPONDENCE OF MARGARET MITCHELL TO LILLIAN SMITH: AN OVERVIEW ....................................................................................... 209 LIST OF REFERENCES .............................................................................................. 212 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ........................................................................................... 223 7 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AKM All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren CS The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor ID Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner IM Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison LR Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy M Meridian by Alice Walker MM Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor SP The Lillian Smith Papers. Department of Special and Area Studies Collections. George A. Smathers Libraries. University of Florida. Gainesville. 8 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THE UNITED STATES SOUTH AND LITERARY STUDIES DURING THE COLD WAR By Jordan J. Dominy August 2011 Chair: Susan Hegeman Major: English This dissertation argues that Southern literature as an academic discipline begins as a direct result of the political, social, and cultural contexts of the United States’ newfound hegemony in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It considers how southern writers’ concerns for political issues—local and global—occur in their writing as concerns for traditional values and morals. These writers also frequently addressed poverty and racism, two weighty flaws of American society. These authors’ literary expressions match the terminology of intellectuals, who were framing the tenets of American democracy as a system of values. These authors’ southern settings and themes allow their work serve a paradoxical purpose. At once these works compartmentalize America’s social ills to a single region of the country while universalizing the notion of racism and poverty as moral problems best dealt with by intellectuals, not political problems under the purview of governments, national or otherwise. To argue this account of southern literature’s development as a formal, institutionalized study, this project addresses through close reading and contextualization a variety of literary texts—periodicals, essays, novels, and short 9 stories—from the 1940s to the early 1970s. Rather than focusing on how these texts are portrayals of the US South, I explore how these authors’ representations of political anxieties related to communism, totalitarianism, racism, and poverty reflect their