Southern Renaissance
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The Southern Renaissance was the reinvigoration of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s with the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams, and Robert Penn Warren, among others.
Prior to this renaissance, Southern writers tended to focus on historical romances about the "Lost Cause" of the South's Civil War defeat and the "idyllic culture" that existed before the war (known as the Antebellum South). While some Southerners, such as African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt, dismissed this view as nostalgia by pointing out the blatant 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 addressing 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 devastating military defeat. The second theme was to focus on the South's conservative culture, specifically on how an individual could exist without losing a sense of identity in a region where family, religion, and community were more highly valued than one's personal and social life. The final theme that the renaissance writers approached was the South's troubled history in regards to racial issues.
Because of these writers' distance from the Civil War and slavery, they were able to bring more objectivity to writings about the South. They also brought new modernistic techniques such as stream of consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their works (as Faulkner did in his novel As I Lay Dying).
Among the writers of the Southern Renaissance, William Faulkner is arguably the most influential and famous, having won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949.
Many Southern writers of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s were inspired by the writers of the Southern Renaissance, including Reynolds Price, James Dickey, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Harper Lee (whose novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and is considered by many to be the greatest Southern novel of the 20th century), along with many others.
