Living Jim Crow: The Segregated Town in Mid-Century Southern Fiction

Gavan Lennon

Published by Edinburgh University Press 2020

Living Jim Crow

The Segregated Town in Mid-Century Southern Fiction

Gavan Lennon

In the series Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474461597

Overview
Contents

About this book

Explores how novelists of the mid-century US South invented small towns to aesthetically undermine racial segregation

Investigates the role of writing in the civil right movement
Explores neglected writers
Uncovers new readings of canonical texts
Models a new form of critical reading based on close textual analysis
Interrogates the relationship between literary production and social protest

Analysing the ubiquity of the small town in fiction of the mid-century US South, Living Jim Crow is the first extended scholarly study to explore how authors mobilised this setting as a tool for racial resistance. With innovative close readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Lillian Smith, Byron Herbert Reece, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and William Melvin Kelley, the book traces the relationship between activism and aesthetics during the long civil rights movement. Lennon reframes a narrative of southern literature during the period as one as one characterised by an aesthetics of protest, identifying a new mode of reading racial resistance and the US South.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgements Publicly Available Download PDF	vi
Introduction: Uncovering a Poetics of Protest Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Creators of the Small Town: Anthropology, Racial Etiquette and African American Fiction in the 1930s Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	21
2. The White Town/Coloured Town Paradigm: Lillian Smith’s Maxwell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
3. An Anatomy of Critique: Byron Herbert Reece’s Tilden Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
4. The Milan Cycle: Carson McCullers’s Milan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
5. Breaking the Pencil: William Faulkner’s Jefferson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
6. Knowing How to Curse: William Melvin Kelley’s Sutton Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
Conclusion: (De)Generative Ground – The Field and the Segregated Town Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	210
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	220
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	236
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	248

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 264
Keywords: Literary Studies

eBook

Published: March 24, 2022
ISBN: 9781474461597