The South that wasn't there : postsouthern memory and history
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The South that wasn't there : postsouthern memory and history
(Southern literary studies)
Louisiana State University Press, c2010
- : cloth
Available at 4 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
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  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-218) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Once, history and ""the South"" dwelt in close proximity. Representations of the South in writing and on film assumed everybody knew what had happened in place and time to create the South. Today, our vision of the South varies, and there is less ""there there"" than ever before.
In The South That Wasn't There, Michael Kreyling explores a series of literary situations in which memory and history seem to work in odd and problematic ways. Looking at Toni Morrison's masterpiece Beloved, he tests the viability of applying Holocaust and trauma studies to the poetics and politics of remembering slavery. He then turns to Robert Penn Warren's grapplings with his personal memory of racism, which culminated in his attempt to confront the evil directly in his book Who Speaks for the Negro? In a chapter on the court contest between Margaret Mitchell's estate and Alice Randall over Randall's parody The Wind Done Gone, Kreyling treats neglected issues such as the status of literary sequels and parody in an age of advanced commodification of the South.
Kreyling's searching inquiry into the intersection of the southern warrior narrative and the shocks dealt America by the Vietnam War uncovers what appears to be the deliberate yet unconscious use of southern Civil War memory in a time of national identity crisis. He follows that up with a comparison of Faulkner's appropriation of Caribbean memory in Absalom, Absalom! and Madison Smartt Bell's in his trilogy on Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian revolution.
Finally, Kreyling examines some new manifestations of southern memory, including science fiction as embodied in Octavia Butler's novel Kindred, ""mockumentary"" in Kevin Willmott's film C.S.A., and postmodern cinema parody in Lars Von Trier's Manderlay.
Lively and frequently confrontational, The South That Wasn't There offers a thought-provoking reexamination of our literary conceptions about the South.
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