John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren—each began his career as one of the coterie of southern poets centered at Vanderbilt University who attracted national attention with their publication of The Fugitive magazine in the early 1920s and the celebrated essays in I’ll Take My Stand. Collectively known as the Fugitives (or Agrarians as they were later called) they became ardent and influential participants in the regionalist-proletarian literary controversies of the Depression decades. Each of the four poets was personally concerned with the connection between their creative work and the social realities around them. In The Wary Fugitives Louis Rubin masterfully explores and illustrates the relationships between their poetry, novels, and literary criticism, and their work as social critics. He conducts, in the process, a revealing and provocative inquiry into the connection between American history and the twentieth-century South.

Anthology of the finest modern Southern poets, including Warren, Ransom, Tate, Davidson.

Previously, the protégés of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren have received considerable scholarly attention only as individuals or in relation to small groups of close-knit writers within single literary genres. Now, for the first time, this far-ranging group of accomplished writers is united as part of a larger phenomenon, the Fugitive legacy, which has extended its influence far beyond the parameters of southern literature. In The Fugitive Legacy, Charlotte H. Beck demonstrates the strong influence of the Nashville Fugitives as teachers, editors, and mentors by examining the extraordinary impact on American letters of the critics, poets, and fiction writers whom they taught or sponsored. By treating the careers of these brilliant authors as a single chapter in literary history, Beck makes an invaluable contribution to the understanding of southern literature. The cultural importance of the Fugitives has too often been confused with the narrow politics of Agrarianism and relegated to a reactionary piety for regionalism and dead tradition. The Fugitive Legacy fills a void in southern literary theory by revealing the resounding echo of this group's voice in modern American literature.

The years after World War I saw a different sort of war in the American South, as Modernism began to contest the "New South Creed" for the allegiance of Southern intellectuals. In The War Within, Daniel Joseph Singal examines the struggle between t

The group known as the Southern Agrarians came out of Vanderbilt University in the wake of the 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. In response to attacks on the South and Southern culture, these scholars and poets-including Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Frank Owsley, and others-turned their attention to the defense of the South and its political tradition in numerous essays and books. Christopher Duncan's Fugitive Theory situates the Agrarians' political thought within the larger context of the Western political tradition in general and in the context of American political thought in particular. Duncan argues that the political theory of the Southern Agrarians is best understood in terms of a civic republicanism that has its roots in the thought of theorists such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, James Harrington, and Thomas Jefferson. In exploring this fascinating chapter of twentieth-century American history Duncan recovers a vision that included a commitment to private property in land, autonomy, and decentralized power-a vision that pitted itself against the call for centralization and materialism implicit in the ascendant industrial order.

As a quintessentially southern campus, Louisiana State University has logically spawned some of the most important regional scholarly studies of the twentieth century. During the campus' golden age in the 1930s, such eminent scholars as Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Eric Voeglin made LSU one of the leading academic institutions in the country. It was during this period that a series called the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, named in honor of a noted scholar and researcher at LSU in the early 1900s, was created to add to the body of knowledge in the developing field of southern history.Now considered one of the most distinguished lecture series of its kind, the Fleming series has brought to the LSU campus scholars of note who have studied the South in its various aspects. Lecturers ranging from C. Vann Woodward and Lewis P. Simpson to Eric Foner and Drew Gilpin Faust have presented a wide panorama of views and methodological approaches. In this book Burl Noggle presents an informative history of the lectures from 1937 through 1990.As a member of the LSU history faculty for more than thirty years, Noggle has heard most of the Fleming lectures delivered and has participated in the selection of lecturers. He thus brings a rather special perspective to his subject -- that of an insider who has been intimately involved in the series itself -- as well as the broader understanding of a mature scholar who has devoted a substantial portion of his career to the analysis of American historiography.Noggle focuses on two aspects of the Fleming series. On one level, he discusses the history of the lectures themselves -- who lectured on what topic, why each lecturer was chose, what general historiographical trends prevailed at the time, and how each speaker's lectures were related to scholarly currents within the profession. On another level, Noggle discusses just what the lecturers said about southern history and how they contributed to, qualified, refuted, or revised existing conceptions about southern history. The Fleming Lectures, 1937--1990 is, therefore, both a history of the lecture series and an analysis of the history contained in the lectures.

In this major reconsideration of a regional consciousness, Richard Gray explores how generations of southerners have been engaged in "writing the South", in reinventing their place even as they describe it. "Humane and learned, informative and analytical, WRITING THE SOUTH is a most impressive addition to cultural inquiry".--THE LISTENER. 12 photos.

Farmer and conservationist Wendell Berry has published more than thirty books, making his name a household word among environmentalists. From his Kentucky farm, Berry preaches and practices stewardship of the land as he seeks to defend the value and traditions of farm life in an industrial capitalist society. A central figure in the greening of American agrarianism, Berry has been an advocate of small farming and traditional values who has tirelessly reminded readers that sustainable agriculture is more than a catchphrase. Kimberly Smith now reveals the depth of his ideas and their relevance for American social and political theory. Berry's central teaching focuses on the fragility of our natural and social worlds; Smith's timely book revisits the problem of living a meaningful life in a world filled with both deadly perils and unimagined possibilities. Hers is the first book to explore the implications of this central tenet and other key aspects of Berry's thought, as well as his overall contribution to environmental theory and politics. Smith shows how the many strands of Berry's thought can be woven together into a coherent agrarian philosophy. Focusing on his relationship to the American agrarian and environmental traditions, she examines how Berry's ecological agrarianism derives from the concept of "grace," or living in concert with nature and society. Along the way, she defends his social theory against accusations of utopianism, shows how his moral theory subverts the notion of rugged individualism usually associated with farming, and reviews his political theory's argument for decentralized democracy. By assessing Berry's reformulation of democratic agrarianism, Smith goes beyond any previous critiques of his writing, and her exploration of Berry's moral vision shows that such vision is more relevant as America continues to move further away from its agrarian past.

Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Selected as an Outstanding Reference Source by the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association There are many anthologies of southern literature, but this is the first companion. Neither a survey of masterpieces nor a biographical sourcebook, The Companion to Southern Literature treats every conceivable topic found in southern writing from the pre-Columbian era to the present, referencing specific works of all periods and genres. Top scholars in their fields offer original definitions and examples of the concepts they know best, identifying the themes, burning issues, historical personalities, beloved icons, and common or uncommon stereotypes that have shaped the most significant regional literature in memory. Read the copious offerings straight through in alphabetical order (Ancestor Worship, Blue-Collar Literature, Caves) or skip randomly at whim (Guilt, The Grotesque, William Jefferson Clinton). Whatever approach you take, The Companion’s authority, scope, and variety in tone and interpretation will prove a boon and a delight. Explored here are literary embodiments of the Old South, New South, Solid South, Savage South, Lazy South, and “Sahara of the Bozart.” As up-to-date as grit lit, K Mart fiction, and postmodernism, and as old-fashioned as Puritanism, mules, and the tall tale, these five hundred entries span a reach from Lady to Lesbian Literature. The volume includes an overview of every southern state’s belletristic heritage while making it clear that the southern mind extends beyond geographical boundaries to form an essential component of the American psyche. The South’s lavishly rich literature provides the best means of understanding the region’s deepest nature, and The Companion to Southern Literature will be an invaluable tool for those who take on that exciting challenge. Description of Contents 500 lively, succinct articles on topics ranging from Abolition to Yoknapatawpha 250 contributors, including scholars, writers, and poets 2 tables of contents — alphabetical and subject — and a complete index A separate bibliography for most entries

Crisscrossing the sprawling landscape of Robert Penn Warren, James H. Justus offers us the first comprehensive survey of Warren’s complete canon, including the poetry of 1980. The temptation for everyone who has written on Warren, our most distinguished man of letters still active in American literature, asserts Justus, “is to analyze those themes and moral situations that, because they recur so frequently and obsessively, constitute the massive centrality of an entire corpus.” Justus attempts “to emphasize the ways by which we become aware of such themes and situations, the technical accomplishment of their rendering, which alone justifies our thinking of Warren as a literary artist.” The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren shows how Warren’s work—his fiction, poetry, literary criticism, historical and personal essays, journalism—is shaped largely by the circumstances not only of his birth and early career as a border-state southerner but also oh his training and later career as a transregional artist and intellectual. Dividing his book into four parts, Justus discusses in Part I Warren’s cycle of themes—the most enduring of which is self-knowledge, the very source of Warren’s life work. He devotes Part II to Warren’s poetry: the “mannered archaism” of his early work, the increasing mastery of the tendencies practiced by his fellow Agrarians—the metaphysical mode—and the advantage of technique in his most recent poems. Part III concern’s Warren’s nonfiction prose, with emphasis on Who Speaks for the Negro and I’ll Take My Stand. In Part IV, Justus, analyzes the novels as political and moral statements in Night Rider, At Heaven’s Gate, and All the King’s Men; as romance and history in World Enough and Time, Band of Angels, and Wilderness; and as “art of transparency,” in The Cave, Flood, Meet Me in the Green Glen, and A Place to Come To. Justus demonstrates Warren’s relish for “crowded densities of actuality” as fulfilled in the novelist’s skill in observing detail. “No other writer has made so much out of our cultural artifacts. . . . WPA murals, big houses and shotgun bungalows, letters and broadsides.” Warren continues in a southern literary tradition. The values of the country and small town, those affecting attitudes toward social cohesion and Christian assumptions about the nature of man, are often seen in conflict with the values of a life governed by art and the academy. Justus also places Warren’s work in the larger context of the various streams of American writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He cites in particular Warren’s unresolved relationship to Emerson and compares Warren to Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In examining Warren’s technical accomplishments, Justus proclaims the novelist/poet to be a man whose distinguished career has surpassed those of Edmund Wilson and Allen Tate. Warren calls himself “a little footnote” in the long history of the intellectual tension between transcendentalism and puritanism. Certainly readers of The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren will begin to understand how Warren’s discrete works relate to each other, how from poems to novels to prose—early and late “nothing is lost.” The undertaking by Justus is massive; the accomplishment, monumental.