Twenty-First-Century Writers: The Rural Southern Tradition Continues

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean W. Cash
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Education ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Rural Families ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
First Century ◽  
Southern Writers ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Universal Themes

This chapter focuses on twenty-first-century writers who carry on the rural southern tradition in their work. Since 2000, several young southern writers, nearly all born after 1975 and from middle-class rural and lower-class backgrounds, have begun to publish fiction. Both portraying the areas where they were born and grew up and transcending those settings to address more universal themes, they have produced a significant body of praiseworthy work. Most were born into rural families but received the benefits of post-secondary education, but all seem committed to presenting the working-class South with realism and empathy. Among these new novelists are Joe Samuel Starnes, Peter Farris, John Brandon, Wiley Cash, Skip Horack, Barb Johnson, Michael Farris Smith, and Jesmyn Ward. Clearly, novels that address southern characters in southern scenes will continue to be written, whether of the Rough South variety from writers like Johnson or from writers like Ward, Horack, Brandon, Cash, and Smith.

Nostalgia, Class and Rurality in Empire Falls

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-518
Author(s):  
STACY DENTON
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Rural Identity ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
American Society ◽  
Rural Places

In American society, rural spaces – particularly those of the working class – are seen as stagnant holdovers from a temporal past that “modern” society has evolved beyond. As a result, working-class rurality and those living within these places are viewed as static, ignorant, insular and so on: whatever places do not conform to the appearance of “modern” progress and development simply must be regressed, on both socioeconomic and cultural levels. While scholars in some disciplines are attempting to redress this misconception, other disciplines (like literary studies) largely align with the mainstream perspective that rurality represents a regressed past to our evolved present. However, despite the critical lack of attention to rurality as a viable space in the present, we can see in various fictional works that working-class rural spaces can effectively show us the interrelationship of rural spaces with “modern” society and culture in the present, the continuing relevance and deep history alike of said spaces, and the potential of these fictional working-class rural places to confront America's norms of progress and development within and without their fictional borders. Richard Russo's fiction illustrates the potential to bring out this critical working-class rural voice. Russo's fictional treatments afford the reader an opportunity to witness the ever-changing complexity (not the temporal and cultural regression) of working-class rurality. In turn, Russo's fictional working-class rural spaces offer a counterperspective to the mainstream (defined here as middle-class and (sub)urban) notions of progress that otherwise dismiss these perspectives. In his book Empire Falls, Russo uses nostalgia to assert this counterperspective. This nostalgia not only reaffirms the postwar and early twenty-first-century working-class rural identity of Empire Falls, but it also offers a critique of dominant conceptions of progress and development that continue into our present.

scholarly journals At Work in Meadowvale Village

2018 ◽  
Vol 108 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-254
Author(s):  
Thomas F. McIlwraith
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
First Century ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Vernacular Landscape

Ontario’s industrial and working-class history has deep roots in the water-powered mills and factories that lined scores of streams throughout the province. Each site drew its cluster of dwellings, general stores, church sanctuaries, travellers’ rests and more. Meadowvale village, founded in the 1830s on the Credit River in Mississauga, is one of these places, and, not simply by chance, it continues to display its mill village vernacular landscape generations after its industrial heyday has passed. Thanks to a community of energetic volunteers responding to opportunities provided by the Ontario Heritage Act (1974), plus a receptive civic administration, this gem of traditional Ontario has withstood suburbanization as it swept across the region. Meadowvale flourishes in the twenty-first century as a distinctive residential enclave in a huge sprawling city.

Workforce Education Leadership in the Twenty-First Century

2017 ◽  
pp. 718-727
Author(s):  
Patricia K. Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Education Leadership ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Workforce Education ◽  
First Century ◽  
Employee Education ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
Leaders And Followers ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Unemployed ◽  
The Relationship

Workforce education leadership has new and specific challenges in the twenty-first century. Leadership is needed in the internally generated employee education event, commercially provided employee education events, by the providers of commercial employee educational event, in re-education for employment by the unemployed or the under-employed, as well as education for employment in secondary and post-secondary settings. The use of twenty-first century skills, creativity, communication, critical thinking, and collaboration, are essential to workforce education leadership in all areas of its application due to the radical change in societies view of the relationship between leaders and followers.

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