Literary Movements

LITERARY MOVEMENTS

Renaissances

Stimulated by the aspiration and confidence that characterized the decade, the literary artists of the 1920s shared an ambition to make their work not just new but an expression of the possibilities of American creative force. The popularity of the term renaissance indicated a belief in the imminence of great developments in American culture. The Harlem Renaissance and the Southern Renaissance shared material but were segregated as to membership; no writer belonged to both.

Southern Renaissance

In 1920 the South was H. L. Mencken's "Sahara of the Bozart"; its literature was retrospective and trapped in the lost culture of Before-the War. Two Richmond novelists who belonged to the Southern establishment, James Branch Cabell and Ellen Glasgow, led the attack on the old school of literature and urged the discovery of Southern writers who would treat Southern material in new ways. Cabell (1879-1958) utilized satire and fantasy in creating the kingdom of Poictesme. Glasgow (1873-1945) utilized satire and realism in portraying the postbellum South. The Richmond-based journal The Reviewer (1921-1925) published Julia Peterkin, DuBose Heyward, and Paul Green. Charleston, South Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were also pockets of literary activity.

Women

Women writers were well represented in the Southern Renaissance. Julia Peterkin wrote about South Carolina plantation blacks; her Scarlet Sister Mary (1928)won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Elizabeth Madox Roberts wrote about rural Kentucky with careful attention to details of speech and behavior; her best-known novel is The Great Meadow (1930). Other notable women writers were Frances Newman (The Hard-Boiled Virgin, 1926) and Evelyn Scott (The Wave, 1929).

Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962) was the greatest figure of the Southern Renaissance. He influenced many writers, North and South, but he was not a joiner or leader. Although his technique and style were innovative, his material was the traditional concerns of Southern literature: the Civil War, slavery, the collapse of the old aristocracy, the effects of commercialism. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County—loosely based on Lafayette County, Mississippi—provides a historical microcosm of the Deep South. If there is an easily recognizable element in Southern writing, it is sense of place and the history associated with place. Even when the writers denounce the pernicious influence of the past, they are nevertheless responding to it. In 1929 Faulkner published Sartoris, which formulated Yoknapatawpha, and The Sound and the Fury, his most technically influential novel. Three years younger than Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was the last major Southern writer to commence publication in the 1920s. His Look Homeward, Angel (1929) recreates Asheville, North Carolina, as Altamont.

Fugitives and Agrarians

Nashville was the venue for the Fugitives and the Agrarians, as well as the incubator for the New Critics. The Fugitives—so designated because of their literary journal, The Fugitive (1922-1925)—were associated with Vanderbilt University; the leading figures in the group were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, and Andrew Lytle. The Fugitives advocated Southern regionalism, opposing Northern industrialism and defending the South as a historical entity. The Agrarians and the Fugitives so thoroughly overlapped—same people, same place, same principles—that it is impossible to differentiate them. In 1930 the Agrarians published their manifesto, T'll Take My Stand, defending the traditional Southern land-based culture against the inroads of industrial capitalism.

New Criticism

Several of the Agrarians founded the New Criticism, a literary school that incubated in The Southern Review, edited by Warren and Cleanth Brooks at Louisiana State University. The New Critics applied close analysis to the language of a work—especially verse—scrutinizing metaphor and imagery. They endeavored to find the meanings of the work in the work itself, apart from biographical or historical considerations.

New Humanism

Of the academic critical movements of the period, only the New Critics enjoyed lasting influence, but the New Humanism was in force during the 1920s. It began as a reaction against the doctrine of scientific determinism, and it stressed the ethical value of experience and the freedom of will. More than the Fugitives and Agrarians, the New Humanists were connected with academic institutions. The principal figures were Irving Babbitt (Harvard), Paul Elmer More (Princeton), and Norman Foerster (University of North Carolina). Among the influential books generated by the New Humanism were Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), More's Shelbourne Essays (1904-1936), and Foerster's American Criticism (1928).

Sources:

Louise Cowen, The Fugitive Group: A Literary History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959);

The Fugitive, periodical;

Louis D. Rubin Jr., ed., The History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisana State University Press, 1985);

John L. Stewart, The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians… (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).