The new southern novel: a bibliographical assay

Abstract

Any attempt to chronicle the contemporary southern novel is beset by troublesome, interlocking questions. Is the very existence of the genro presumptive? If not, does its tradition continue to instill a sectional awareness among writers flourishing in the last years of the twentieth century? If so, is it not the case that to read any literary text as a mimetic expression of a geographical region is to confine each to the other and to ignore the quiddity of both? no task of the chronicler is further beset by the tenets of recent literary theory, for a notion prevails that there are no essential differences between fiction and hístory and that the writings of literary theorists are not to be distinguished from literary texts - with implications that run amok in a historically and critically-haunted literature like that of the American South.