Dixie Limited : railroads, culture, and the southern renaissance / Joseph R. Millicha.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Millichap, Joseph R.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--Southern States--History and criticism.

American literature.

Railroads.

Southern States.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Southern States--In literature.

Railroads--Southern States.

Railroads in literature.

Southern States--Civilization--1865-.

Civilization.

Physical Description:

ix, 146 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, [2002]

Summary:

In the South, railroads have two meanings: they are an economic force that can sustain a town and they are a metaphor for the process of southern industrialization. Recognizing this duality, Joseph Millichap's Dixie Limited is a detailed reading of the complex and often ambivalent relationships among technology, culture, and literature that railroads represent in selected writers and works of the Southern Renaissance.

Tackling such Southern Renaissance giants as Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and William Faulkner, Millichap mingles traditional American and Southern studies -- in their emphases on literary appreciation and evaluation in terms of national and regional concerns -- with contemporary cultural meaning in terms of gender, race, and class. Millichap juxtaposes Faulkner's semi-autobiographical families with Wolfe's fiction, which represents changing attitudes toward the "Southern Other." Faulkner's later fiction is compared to that of Warren, Welty, and Ellison, and Warren's later poetry moves toward the contemporary post-Southernism of Dave Smith. These disparate examples suggest the subject of the final chapter -- the continuing search for post-Southern patterns of persistence and change that reiterate, reject, and perhaps reconfigure the Southern Renaissance.

It is appropriate, as we enter the twenty-first century, that we recall how much the twentieth-century South was shaped by railroads built in the nineteenth century. It is also important that we recognize how much our future will be determined by the technological and cultural tracks we lay.

Contents:

Railroads, culture, and the southern renaissance

William Faulkner's cultural history : railroads in the Sartoris fictions

Thomas Wolfe's southern railroads : Look homeward, angel and later

William Faulkner's cultural geography : railroads in Go down, Moses

Robert Penn Warren's modern fictive railroads : All the king's men and others

Eudora Welty's real and recreated railroads : Delta wedding

Ralph Ellison's railroad passages : before Invisible man and after

Robert Penn Warren's post-modern postmodern poetic railroads : ballads and recollections

Dave Smith's post-southern railroad poetry : The roundhouse voices

Railroads, culture, the southern renaissance, and post-southernism.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [135]-139) and index.

ISBN:

0813122341

OCLC:

47718100