Southern Renaissance - The Emergence of A New Critical Spirit

The Emergence of A New Critical Spirit

The Southern Renaissance in the 1920s had been preceded by a long period after the Civil War during which Southern literature was dominated by writers who supported the Lost Cause. Yet the critical spirit that characterized the Southern Renaissance did have roots in the era that preceded it.

From the 1880s onwards, a few white Southern authors, such as George Washington Cable and Mark Twain (often considered a Southerner because he grew up in the slave state of Missouri and wrote about the South) dismissed this nostalgia by pointing out the blatant racism and exploitation of blacks at that time, and ridiculing the notion of Southern "chivalry".

In the 1890s, the writings of journalist Walter Hines Page and academics William Peterfield Trent and John Spencer Bassett severely criticized the cultural and intellectual mediocrity of the men who held power in the South. In 1903, Basset, an academic at Trinity College (later Duke University) angered many influential white Southerners when he called African-American leader Booker T. Washington "the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in a hundred years."

The most comprehensive and outspoken criticisms directed against the tenets of the "Lost Cause" before the First World War were put forth by African American writers who grew up in the South, most famously by Charles W. Chesnutt in his novels The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901). However, before the 1970s, African-American authors from the South were not considered part of Southern literature by the white and mostly male authors and critics who considered themselves the main creators and guardians of the Southern literary tradition.

The Southern Renaissance was the first mainstream movement within Southern literature to address the criticisms of Southern cultural and intellectual life that had emerged both from within the Southern literary tradition and from outsiders, most notably the satirist H.L. Mencken. In the 1920s Mencken led the attack on the genteel tradition in American literature, ridiculing the provinicialism of American intellectual life. In his 1920 essay "The Sahara of the Bozart" (a pun on a Southern pronunciation of 'beaux-arts') he singled out the South as the most provincial and intellectually barren region of the US, claiming that since the Civil War, intellectual and cultural life there had gone into terminal decline. This created a storm of protest from within conservative circles in the South. However, many emerging Southern writers who were already highly critical of contemporary life in the South were emboldened by Mencken's essay. On the other hand, Mencken's subsequent bitter attacks on aspects of Southern culture that they valued amazed and horrified them. In response to the attacks of Mencken and his imitators, Southern writers were provoked to a reassertion of Southern uniqueness and a deeper exploration of the theme of Southern identity.