Overview
Prior to this renaissance, Southern writers tended to focus on historical romances about the "Lost Cause" of the Confederate States of America. This writing glorified the heroism of the Confederate army and civilian population during the Civil War and the supposedly "idyllic culture" that existed in the South before the war (known as the Antebellum South).
The belief in the heroism and morality of the South's "Lost Cause" was a driving force in Southern literature between the Civil War and World War I. The Southern Renaissance changed this by addressing three major themes in their works. The first was the burden of history in a place where many people still remembered slavery, Reconstruction, and a devastating military defeat. The second theme was to focus on the South's conservative culture, specifically on how an individual could exist without losing a sense of identity in a region where family, religion, and community were more highly valued than one's personal and social life. The final theme that the renaissance writers approached was the South's troubled history in regards to racial issues. Because of these writers' distance from the Civil War and slavery, they were able to bring more objectivity to writings about the South. They also brought new modernistic techniques such as stream of consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their works (as Faulkner did in his novel As I Lay Dying).
Among the writers of the Southern Renaissance, William Faulkner is arguably the most influential and famous. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949.
Read more about this topic: Southern Renaissance