Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature

Shows how representations of poor white southerners helped shape middle-class identity and major American literary movements and genres.

Jolene Hubbs (Author)

9781009250658, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 December 2022

280 pages
23.6 x 15.9 x 1.8 cm, 0.46 kg

Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature explores the role that representations of poor white people play in shaping both middle-class American identity and major American literary movements and genres across the long twentieth century. Jolene Hubbs reveals that, more often than not, poor white characters imagined by middle-class writers embody what better-off people are anxious to distance themselves from in a given moment. Poor white southerners are cast as social climbers during the status-conscious Gilded Age, country rubes in the modern era, racist obstacles to progress during the civil rights struggle, and junk food devotees in the health-conscious 1990s. Hubbs illuminates how Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, and Barbara Robinette Moss swam against these tides, pioneering formal innovations with an eye to representing poor white characters in new ways.

Introduction: Poor White Southerners in the American Imaginary
1. Riffraff and Half-Strainers: Charles W. Chesnutt and Regionalism
2. Slow, Sweating, Stinking Bumpkins: William Faulkner and Modernism
3. Civil Rights and Uncivil Whites: Flannery O'Connor and Southern Women's Midcentury Writing
4. Hungry Women and Horny Men: Dorothy Allison, Barbara Robinette Moss, and Grit Lit
Coda.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]