With the dawn of the new south immediately following the civil war, southern literature metamorphosed to reflect a sense of nostalgia for what had been and no longer was. The literary canon of the time contained thematic expressions of yearning over the “Lost South” and the tradition and stability most writers felt the old South had once embodied. However, different writers utilized contrasting literary styles to convey this message. For instance, Thomas Nelson Page utilizes a sentimentalist, romanticist style of writing, while John Crowe Ransom achieves aesthetic distance in his modernistic approach to writing. Both Page and Ransom were proponents of the antebellum southern way of life. They contrasted what had previously existed in the Old South through the depiction of grand estates and chivalric deeds against what now existed in a dilapidated, dehumanizing fashion, the New South. However, while they both had a similar message, their strategies of addressing the issues were expressed in vastly different voices, diction, and figures of thought.
It is important to note, that while this paper will take a look at the dissimilar literary modes of construction utilized by both Page and Ransom, the texts for comparisons used in this essay are short-story (Page), versus poems (Ransom). Obviously, there will be few minor contextual limitations in comparing literary styles between two separate genres. However, the different writing styles will be evident via a comparison of the conative and emotive functions within the texts themselves.
First, we will begin our literary critique with Thomas Nelson Page. Page, a highly popularized souther...
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...eme by Ransom. I believe this contrast is clearly seen through the contextual creation and voices used by each respective writer and assists in giving a fuller and richer explanation of the annals of history; particularly that of the Old South.
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Writing around the same time period as Phillips, though from the obverse vantage, was Richard Wright. Wright’s essay, “The Inheritors of Slavery,” was not presented at the American Historical Society’s annual meeting. His piece is not festooned with foot-notes or carefully sourced. It was written only about a decade after Phillips’s, and meant to be published as a complement to a series of Farm Credit Administration photographs of black Americans. Wright was not an academic writing for an audience of his peers; he was a novelist acceding to a request from a publisher. His essay is naturally of a more literary bent than Phillips’s, and, because he was a black man writing ...
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Both of these authors’ short stories cover the changing south. Both of their short stories give us a profound impact on the thinking of these two men when it comes to their views of the south. Coming from different backgrounds this gives the reader a good view of what the overall picture of the south looked like at the time. Faulkner and Ellis disagreed about how differences were handled in the south and whether the changing south was good or bad, but they both of them agreed that the south changing was unavoidable.
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Over the course of his decades-long career as a respected and influential man of letters, he also wrote an extensive collection of critical essays. In such piece, “A Southern Mode of Imagination,” he argues that the renascence of Southern letters occurred because of a shift in the way Southerners thought; a change from what he termed the extroverted “rhetorical mode” of tall-tales and politicking, to the introspective and hitherto primarily Northern “dialectical mode.” From his unique position as both a critic of the Renaissance and one of its vanguards, Tate posits that the antebellum Southern mind lacked the self-consciousness necessary to produce great writing because it was wholly occupied with defending slavery against the attacks of the North upon the ‘peculiar institution.’ The mind of the South focused outwards in response to those attacks, seeking to justify itself with one foot “upon the neck of a Negro Slave” ; that is to say, Southerners were rhetorical in defense of the indefensible. Their all-consuming and unwinnable defensive stance absorbed any potential for great literature even well after the cause was lost: Southern literature was practically non-existent prior to the publication of the first issue of The Fugitive in 1922. According to Tate’s theory, it was not until the South underwent a shift in its “mode of the imagination” that it was capable of producing writers like those of the Renaissance. Tate theorizes that this change occurred in part because the South ended its self-imposed isolation with the advent of World War I and “saw for the first time since 1830 that the Yankees were not to blame for everything.” The South’s mental energies were no longer entirely engrossed in resistance to Northerners ...
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