White Trash - in Literature

In Literature

  • Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland's play Po' White Trash, published in 1900, exposes complicated cultural tensions in the post-Reconstruction South, at the heart of which is the racial status of poor whites.
  • Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) explores images of 'white trash' women. Jackson (2000) argues that Hurston's meditation on abjection, waste, and the construction of class and gender identities among poor whites reflects the eugenics discourses of the 1920s.
  • Jim Goad's Redneck Manifesto (1997) explores the history of the pejorative term "White trash", as well as details the history and class issues related to the impoverished European diaspora in North America.

Read more about this topic:  White Trash

Famous quotes containing the word literature:

    “I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.”
    —Marguerite Duras (b. 1914)

    “The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign,—is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)