Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars, 1918-1939

by Richard Godden (Editor), Martin Crawford (Editor), Andrew Warnes (Contribution by), Clive Webb (Contribution by), James C. Giesen (Contribution by)

Overview

Franklin D. Roosevelt once described the South as "the nation's number one economic problem." These twelve original, interdisciplinary essays on southern indigence between the World Wars share a conviction that poverty is not just a dilemma of the marketplace but also a cultural and political construction. Although previous studies have examined the web of coercive social relations in which sharecroppers, wage laborers, and other poor southerners were held in place, this volume opens up a new perspective. These essays show that professed forces of change and modernization in the South—writers, photographers, activists, social scientists, and policymakers—often subtly upheld the structures by which southern labor was being exploited.

Planters, politicians, and others who enforced the southern economic and social status quo not only relied on bigotry but also manipulated deeply held American beliefs about sturdy yeoman nobility and the sanctity of farm and family. Conversely, any threats to the system were tarred with the imagery of big cities, northerners, and organized labor. The essays expose vestiges of these beliefs in sources as varied as photographs from the Farm Security Administration, statistics for incarceration and child labor, and the writings of Grace Lumpkin, Ellen Glasgow, and Erskine Caldwell. This volume shows that those who work to eradicate poverty—and even victims of poverty themselves—can hesitate to cross the line of race, gender, memory, or tradition in pursuit of their goal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820327082
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	06/25/2006
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

ANDREW WARNES is Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at Leeds University. He is the author of Hunger Overcome? (Georgia) and Richard Wright's Native Son.

CLIVE WEBB is a lecturer in American history at the University of Sussex.

JOHN C. INSCOE is a professor of history emeritus at the University of Georgia and the founding editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia. He is coauthor of The Heart of Confederate Appalachia.

JOHN T. MATTHEWS is a professor of English at Boston University. His research focuses on American literature, modernist studies, literary theory, and literature of the U.S. South, with special attention to William Faulkner. He is the author of The Play of Faulkner's Language and William Faulkner: Seeing through the South.

RICHARD GRAY is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex and the first specialist in American literature to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy. The author or editor of more than fifteen books, he is currently co-organizing a major international, collaborative research project, Transatlantic Exchanges: The South in Europe-Europe in the American South.

ROBERT H. BRINKMEYER JR. is professor and chair of the Department of English at the University of Arkansas. His books include Katherine Anne Porter’s Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism; The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor; and Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South.

Richard Godden (Editor)
RICHARD GODDEN is a professor of American history and literature at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Fictions of Labor and Fictions of Capital.

Martin Crawford (Editor)
MARTIN CRAWFORD is a professor of Anglo-American history at Keele University. His books include Liberating Sojourn, Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars (both Georgia), and Ashe County's Civil War.

Editorial Reviews

Strong collection of essays . . . Powerfully interdisciplinary, the chapters juxtapose work on photographs, the social history of poverty, fiction, and memoir in a successful effort to make the scholars see a more complicated picture of southern rural poverty in the first half of the twentieth century.

Journal of Southern History

This volume of insightful essays . . . [is] recommended.

Choice

Reading Southern Poverty is an excellent guide to understanding southern history and culture.

McCormick Messenger

Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars offers a useful interpretive model for understanding several different expressions of southern interwar culture. It is particularly pleasing to see a collection of essays on southern history and culture that draws equally upon innovative work being done in literary studies and cultural history, two fields that often have gone their separate ways. This book should have cross-disciplinary appeal.

Rice University - Alex Lichtenstein

For historians of the twentieth-century South, this will likely be an important book, with essays suitable for classroom use as well as for their own research.

Journal of American History

"Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars offers a useful interpretive model for understanding several different expressions of southern interwar culture. It is particularly pleasing to see a collection of essays on southern history and culture that draws equally upon innovative work being done in literary studies and cultural history, two fields that often have gone their separate ways. This book should have cross-disciplinary appeal."—Alex Lichtenstein, Rice University

"For historians of the twentieth-century South, this will likely be an important book, with essays suitable for classroom use as well as for their own research."—Journal of American History

“Strong collection of essays . . . Powerfully interdisciplinary, the chapters juxtapose work on photographs, the social history of poverty, fiction, and memoir in a successful effort to make the scholars see a more complicated picture of southern rural poverty in the first half of the twentieth century."—Journal of Southern History

"This volume of insightful essays . . . [is] recommended."—Choice

"Reading Southern Poverty is an excellent guide to understanding southern history and culture."—McCormick Messenger

From the Publisher