| In the late nineteenth century, as the study of history shifted
from the domain of letters into the social sciences, novelists
in the North and the West generally turned away from writing
history. Many southern novelists and poets, however, continued
to undertake historical writing as an extension of their art
form. What made southern literary figures differ from their
northern and western counterparts? In A Disturbing and Alien
Memory, Douglas L. Mitchell addresses this intriguing question
by tracing a line of southern writers from the early nineteenth
century to the mid-twentieth, finding that an obsessive need
to defend the South and the oft-noted "rage to explain" drove
some creative writers to continue to make forays into history
and biography in an effort to enter a more public sphere where
they could more decisively influence interpretations of the
past.
In the Romantic history of the nineteenth century, Mitchell
explains, men of letters saw themselves as keepers of memory
whose renderings of the past could help shape the future of
the nation. He explores the historical writing of William
Gilmore Simms to trace the failure of Romantic nationalism
in the growing split between North and South, then turns to
Thomas Nelson Page's effort to resurrect the South as a "spiritual
nation" with a redeemed history after the Civil War. Mitchell
juxtaposes their work with that of William Wells Brown, the
pioneering African American historian and novelist who used
the authority of history to write blacks into the American
story.
Moving into the twentieth century, Mitchell analyzes the
historical component of the Southern Agrarian project, focusing
on the tension between modernist aesthetics and polemical
aims in Allen Tate's Civil War biographies. He then traces
a path toward a viable historical vision Robert Penn Warren's
recovery of a tragic understanding and the creation of a compelling
historical art in the work of Shelby Foote. Throughout, Mitchell
examines the peculiar dilemma of southern writers, the changing
nature of history and its relation to the realm of letters,
and the question of public authority, shedding light on several
neglected texts in the process—including Simms's The Sack
and Destruction of Columbia, S.C., Brown's The Negro
in the American Rebellion, Tate's Jefferson Davis,
and Warren's John Brown.
Offering a new perspective on a perennial debate in southern
letters, A Disturbing and Alien Memory provides a critical
framework for a neglected genre in the southern literary canon.
Douglas L. Mitchell is assistant professor of English
at the University of Mobile in Alabama. |
