Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition (Fleming Lecture)

By Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Book Overview

From Edgar Allan Poe's dark fore-bodings to Kate Chopin's lifelong struggle with sorrow and loss, depression has shadowed southern letters. This beautifully realized study explores the defining role of melancholy in southern literature from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, when it evolved into modernist alienation. While creativity and depression have been linked throughout Western history, Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that nineteenth-century southern culture was hospitable to a distinctive melancholy that impelled literary production. Deeply marked by high death rates, social dread, and bitter defeat, white southerners imposed a climate of parochial pride, stifling conventions of masculinity, social condescension, and mistrust of intellectualism. Many writers experienced a conscious or unconscious alienation from the prevailing social currents. And they expressed emotional turmoil in and through their writing. Hearts of Darkness develops original insights into the lives and creative impulses of both major and more obscure writers. Discussing individuals as diverse as William Gilmore Simms, Mark Twain, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Sidney Lanier, and Ellen Glasgow

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807128228
• ISBN13: 9780807128220
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
• Length: 235 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.8" x 9.3"