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region and class in recent southern literature
Essays in Rough South, Rural South describe and discuss the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education, including Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Brad Watson, Daniel Woodrell and Steve Yarbrough. Their twenty-first-century colleagues are Wiley Cash, Peter Farris, Skip Horack, Michael Farris Smith, Barb Johnson and Jesmyn Ward. In his seminal article, Erik Bledsoe distinguishes Rough South writers from such writers as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Younger writers who followed Harry Crews were born into and write about the Rough South. These writers undercut stereotypes, forcing readers to see the working poor differently. The next pieces begin with those on Crews and Cormac McCarthy, major influences on an entire generation. Later essays address members of both groups, the self-educated and the college-educated. Both groups share a clear understanding of the value of working-class southerners. Nearly all of the writers hold a reverence for the South's landscape and its inhabitants as well as an affinity for realistic depictions of setting and characters.
Introduction: rough South, rural South / Jean W. Cash -- "Rough South": beginnings / Gary Hawkins -- From "The rise of southern redneck and white trash writers" / Erik Bledsoe -- Harry Crews: progenitor / David K. Jeffrey -- Elevated above the real: the poor white southerner in Cormac McCarthy's early novels / Marcus Hamilton -- Tim McLaurin: universality from rural North Carolina / bes Stark Spangler -- Larry Brown: a firefighter finds his voice / Joe Samuel Starnes -- Dorothy Allison: revising the "white trash" narrative / Emily Langhorne -- A world almost rotten: the fiction of William Gay / William Giraldi -- "Recover the paths": salvage in Tom Franklin's fiction / Joan Wylie Hall -- The rough South of Ron Rash / Thomas Ærvold Bjerre -- "Everything worth doing hurts like Hell": the rough South of Tim Gautreaux / L. Lamar Nisly -- Education is everything: Chris Offutt's eastern Kentucky / Peter Farris -- Daniel Woodrell, Ozarker / Shawn E. Miller -- Kaye Gibbons: tough women in a rough South / Rebecca Godwin -- Lee Smith: a diamond from the rough / Linda Byrd Cook -- A country for old men: the South of Clyde Edgerton's early novels / Robert Donahoo -- Jill McCorkle: the rough South from one remove / Barbara Bennett -- "The spiritual energy of the trees": nature, place, and religion in Silas House's Crow County trilogy / Scott Hamilton Suter -- Steve Yarbrough: transplanted Mississippian / Thomas E. Dasher -- Once a paradise: Brad Watson's southern afterlife / Wade Newhouse -- Twenty-first-century writers: the rural southern tradition continues / Jean W. Cash -- Trash or treasure? Images of the hardscrabble South in twenty-first-century film / Richard Gaughran -- Notes on contributors -- Photograph credits -- Index.
Includes bibliographical references and index.