Disruption of the Traditional View of the Southern Past in Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Shiloh”

Year 1999, Issue: 10, 49 - 58, 01.10.1999

Teresa Moralejo-gárate

Abstract

A major aspect of what is termed Southern Renaissance literature in the US is known to be a striking obsession with the past. “The Southern writers of the postFirst World War age,” writes Lewis P. Simpson, “inaugurated a struggle to comprehend the nature of memory and history, and to assert the redemptive meaning of the classical-Christian past in its bearing on the present.” So, the “Southern literary mind . . . began to seek and to symbolize this antagonism in an image of recovery . . . of memory and history 70 . Such an obsession naturally brought with it a condemnation of modern times. Almost “all Southern novelists whose writings have appeared since World War I have criticized the emphasis modern society has placed on technology and consumer economics,” as Thomas Daniel Young puts it 1 . Thus, US Southern Renaissance fiction is characterized by its depiction of the tension, in Southern society, between tradition and modernity.

References

• Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. ‘‘Finding One’s History: Bobbie Ann Mason and Contemporary Southern Literature.’’ The Southern Literary Journal 19 (Spring 1987), 20-33.
• Giannone, Richard. ‘‘Bobbie Ann Mason and the Recovery of Mystery.’’ Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Fall 1990), 553-55.
• Hobson, Fred. The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World. Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1991.
• Mason, Bobbie Ann. “Shiloh.” Shiloh and Other Stories. 1982. London: Flamingo, 1988. 9-24.
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• Simpson, Lewis P. The Dispossessed Garden. Pastoral and History in Southern Literature. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1975.
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• Young, Thomas Daniel. The Past in the Present. A Thematic Study of Modern Southern Fiction. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.