The Immoderate Past: The Southern Writer and History

Informationen zum Autor C. Hugh Holman! who taught for many years in the English department at the University of North Carolina! was a highly regarded scholar of such writers as Thomas Wolfe! John P. Marquand! and William Gilmore Simms. He wrote or edited a number of books! including "A Handbook to Literature!" "The American Novel through Henry James!" and "The World of Thomas Wolfe." Holman was instrumental in the creation of the National Humanities Center. The Society for the Study of Southern Literature gives an annual award in his name for "the best book of literary scholarship or literary criticism in the field of Southern Literature." Klappentext The Immoderate Past deals with the southern writer's preoccupation with history! concentrating on representative novelists from three major periods. Finding the origins of this preoccupation in the antebellum period! when most American novelists wrote in the mode of Sir Walter Scott! C. Hugh Holman examines the Revolutionary romances of William Gilmore Simms. With the coming of realism to American fiction after the Civil War! the southern writer turned to a combination of the realistic method with the novel of manners in order to describe the way of life in the South during the nineteenth century. The Civil War replaced the American Revolution as the crucial event in the novels of this second period and was seen as disrupting the quality and texture of antebellum southern life. To illustrate the southern novel in the realistic tradition! Holman discusses Ellen Glasgow's The Battleground! DuBose Heyward's Peter Ashley! Stark Young's So Red the Rose! Allen Tate's The Fathers! Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind! and Margaret Walker's Jubilee. Since the 1930s writers in the region have experimented with modernistic techniques distorting reality in order to make special statement about the nature and meaning of the southern experience. To illustrate this latest development in southern writing! Holman turns to William Faulkner's Light in August and Absalom! Absalom!; Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men! World Enough and Time! Brother to Dragons! and Wilderness; and William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner. The Immoderate Past closes with a consideration of the extent to which southern novelists have persisted in using time as a major dimension in their fiction! whereas time has tended to be displaced by space in the standard American novel. Zusammenfassung Holman deals with the southern writer's preoccupation with history! concentrating on specific novelists from three major periods! showing an evolution of the representation reality and of time. He examines the works of William Gilmore Simms! Ellen Glasgow! and William Faulkner! among others. ...

Klappentext

"The Immoderate Past" deals with the southern writer's preoccupation with history, concentrating on representative novelists from three major periods. Finding the origins of this preoccupation in the antebellum period, when most American novelists wrote in the mode of Sir Walter Scott, C. Hugh Holman examines the Revolutionary romances of William Gilmore Simms. With the coming of realism to American fiction after the Civil War, the southern writer turned to a combination of the realistic method with the novel of manners in order to describe the way of life in the South during the nineteenth century. The Civil War replaced the American Revolution as the crucial event in the novels of this second period and was seen as disrupting the quality and texture of antebellum southern life. To illustrate the southern novel in the realistic tradition, Holman discusses Ellen Glasgow's "The Battleground," DuBose Heyward's "Peter Ashley," Stark Young's "So Red the Rose," Allen Tate's "The Fathers," Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind," and Margaret Walker's "Jubilee." Since the 1930s writers in the region have experimented with modernistic techniques distorting reality in order to make special statement about the nature and meaning of the southern experience. To illustrate this latest development in southern writing, Holman turns to William Faulkner's "Light in August" and "Absalom, Absalom!"; Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," "World Enough and Time," "Brother to Dragons," and "Wilderness"; and William Styron's "Confessions of Nat Turner." "The Immoderate Past" closes with a consideration of the extent to which southern novelists have persisted in using time as a major dimension in their fiction, whereas time has tended to be displaced by space in the standard American novel.