The Road

Introduction

Guinn surveys the field of contemporary Southern fiction and based upon a reading of the works of Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, Bobbie Ann Mason, Kaye Gibbons, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Randall Kenan, and Barry Hannah offers an assessment of their work which measures them not against the standards of the Renascence but on their own terms. To be sure, Guinn offers strong readings and analyses of each text he considers, but the greatest value of his book may be as a theoretical work of Southern literary studies because he clears a space from which to examine contemporary Southern literature which doesn't automatically relegate these authors to the category of secondclass citizens. In surveying such an eclectic group of writers, Guinn discovers that what binds these authors together is not a common philosophy or technique but their revisions of the high-modernist metanarrative constructed by many Southern Renascence figures and their attendant literary critics.

In responding to the modernist imperative to find a unifying myth with which to impose order upon a chaotic landscape, a common note sounded throughout many canonical Southern writers and their commentators, Guinn discovers that contemporary Southern writers have tended to react against this "rage for order" with two strategies: neo-naturalism and mythoclasm. (Warren, p.17) For instance, Crews, Allison, and Brown have helped to give voice to the marginalized lives of poor white Southerners for whom the moonlight and magnolias myth of Southern culture has been a lie. The agrarian ideal of close harmony with the land and the nobility of rural life is exploded in their fiction-in the work of Crews, Allison, and Brown, the lives of "grits," "crackers," and "white trash" are filled with back-breaking labor, economic exploitation, and sexual abuse. Mythoclasm, the other response of many contemporary Southern writers, is Guinn's neologism for an iconoclastic response to the predominant myths of the region. Prime examples of this response are McCarthy's and Hannah's postmodern insistence that the South's past was not some Arcadian dream of order and harmony but was filled with and predicated upon violence. Guinn very ably demonstrates the indebtedness of the "neo-naturalists" to the long tradition of American naturalists, and makes many intriguing connections between Southern "mythoclastic" writers and their postmodern contemporaries.

American literature is unique in the number of voices and cultures it conveys, giving it the power to transform opinions and challenge stereotypes in both obvious and subtle ways. Christa Smith Anderson explains that Southern writers drew on oral tradition and social conflict to striking effect.

Some of the West African countries producing powerful writings include Nigeria, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, and Sénégal. And some of the most outstanding writers come from Nigeria alone--Amos Tutola (1920--, novelist-short story writer, principal works: The Palm Wine Drinkard, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle, The Brave African Huntress), Gabriel Okara (1921, poet-novelist, principal works--poetry: Were I to Choose and Other Poems; novel: The Voice), Chinua Achebe (1930--, novelist and prose writer, ...