Apocalypse South Judgment, Cataclysm, and Resistance in the Regional Imaginary
While John Winthrop might have famously uttered the phrase "city upon a hill" on the way to Massachusetts, the strands of millennialism and exceptionalism that remain so central to U.S. political discourse are now dominated by eschatological visions that have emerged from the particular hi...
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Main Author | |
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Format | eBook |
Language | English |
Published |
Ohio State University Press
29.01.2021
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | While John Winthrop might have famously uttered the phrase "city
upon a hill" on the way to Massachusetts, the strands of
millennialism and exceptionalism that remain so central to U.S.
political discourse are now dominated by eschatological visions
that have emerged from the particular historical experiences of the
U.S. South. Despite the strategic exploitation of this reality by
political communicators, scholars in the humanities have paid
little attention to the eschatological visions offered by southern
religious culture. Fortunately, writers and artists have not
ignored such matters; compared to their academic counterparts,
southern novelists have been far better attuned to a southern
apocalyptic imaginary -a field of reference, drawn from the
cosmology of southern evangelical Protestantism, that maps the
apocalyptic possibilities of cataclysm, judgment, deliverance, and
even revolution onto the landscape of the region. Apocalypse
South rectifies the omissions in existing scholarship by
interrogating the role of apocalyptic discourse in selected works
of fiction by four southern writers-William Faulkner, Richard
Wright, Randall Kenan, and Dorothy Allison. In doing so, it
reinvigorates discussions of religion in southern literary
scholarship and introduces a new element in the ongoing
investigation into how regional identities function in notions of
national mission and American exceptionalism. Engaging concerns of
religion, race, sexuality, and community in fiction from the 1930s
to the present, Apocalypse South offers a new conceptual
framework for considering what has long been considered "southern
Gothic literature"-a framework less concerned with the conventions
of a particular literary genre than with the ways in which
literature exposes and even tries to make sense of the
contradictions within cultures. |
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ISBN: | 9780814212011 0814212018 |
DOI: | 10.2307/j.ctv1cbn44d |