Literary Genres
Darker style of Southern writing popular after the emergence of the Southern Renascence. Emphasizes themes such as Southern honor, violence, and religion.
Southern Gothic
Describes how outsiders writing for popular American periodicals described Appalachian life as backwards and benighted. Her work also demonstrates how Appalachian folk pushed back agains these images of their culture.
Katie Algeo
Poe's story of the lineal fall of an aristocratic Southern family into madness and hereditary decline.
"The Fall of the House of Usher"
Most important African American writer of the 19th century. Crafted a heroic self-image in his 1845 slave narrative.
Frederick Douglass
The Southern economic ideal that contrasts with industrialism and growth economics.
Agrarianism
Associated with the American Renaissance of the 1830s and 40s, including Poe and William Gilmore Simms. Emphasizes concepts like the Sublime, the picturesque, and the beautiful.
Literary Romanticism/Dark Romanticism
His Mind of the South elaborated the "Savage Ideal" of the South as a violent place where one must conform or pay the social price. Killed himself in Mexico.
W.J. Cash
In Benjy's section of The Sound and the Fury, the name of the literary technique Faulkner uses. Includes synesthesia, time skips, and slippage in and out of memory to describe Benjy's interiority.
Stream of Consciousness
Her chapter, "The Loophole of Retreat" has been interpreted as a subversion of surveillance techniques used traditionally by white Southerns in the plantation system.
Harriet Jacobs
The association of Southerners with natives of the Global South, and especially the tropical regions in Central and South America. Often emphasizes Southern indolence, violence, and moral degeneracy.
Tropicality
Local Color Fiction
Argued that you can define Southern literature by whether or not it includes a dead mule. Tongue-in-cheeck essay with depth that connects to the Southern tradition of irony.
Jerry Leath Mills
The paradigmatic ironic essay on Southern writing. Argues for a ratiocinative process beginning with the intended effects of a story and moving backwards to specific choices in story construction.
The authors whose Uncle Remus and Uncle Julius McAdoo.
Daily Double: Name the books their stories were published in.
Joel Chandler Harris and Charles Chesnutt
The representational ideal in literature by writers of the U.S. Northeast that the South should be reintegrated conceptually back into the Union. Elaborated by Jennifer Greeson in her book Our South.
Regional Reconciliation
An early 20th century genre that responded to the fragmentation of old metanarratives about human progress or centrality. These writers use experimental writing techniques to reflect that fragmentation.
Literary Modernism
In the 1990s, argued that the symbols of Whiteness and Blackness in American literature are key to understanding canonical works.
Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark
The Compsons are one of two families central to The Sound and the Fury. Dilsey's surname is the second.
Gibson
This Chapel Hill poet, was born enslaved. His poem "Division of an Estate" elaborated what the critic Fred Moten will later call "how it feels to be a commodity."
George Moses Horton
A tendency of Southern writers to constantly reference previous writers. Called a central figure of African American writing in Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey.
Intertextuality
Spanish-language firsthand accounts of indigenous or subaltern life by non-academics or professionals.
Testimonio
His "Literature of the South" was an early example of the Southern nationalism that would influence the Agrarians. His critique of the South's cultural vacuity is mirrored in H.L. Mencken's later essay "The Sahara of the Bozart."
Henry Timrod
In Poe's novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, where does Pym's expedition begin and where does it end? City, State and Continent
Nantucket, Massachusetts and Antarctica
Author of Clotel. 19th century Black Agrarian writer whose ideas gun ownership presage Robert F. William's Negroes with Guns by a century.
William Wells Brown
Anti-Spanish and Portugese sentiment in the writings of Anglo-Americans. Often represented in literature by the Spaniard's figuration as a racialized Other.
The Black Legend