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:

    “Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
    —Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)

    “First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.”
    —Mason Cooley (b. 1927)