Peculiar Whiteness

Peculiar Whiteness argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as ‘white trash’ have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety-inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or with other troubling conditions such as physical difference. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., ‘white trash,’ tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, the book analyzes how we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to re-categorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of ‘white trash.’

Tom and Friends

Chapter 1 locates the treatment of poor whites in the new plantation tradition of post-Reconstruction southern literature, with especial focus on Thomas Dixon’s work, his respondent Sutton Griggs, and Charles Chesnutt, whose 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream analyses the ascendance of poor whites into formerly bourgeois spaces. Focusing on Dixon, the chapter discusses how racial anxiety relates to the myths surrounding the protection of white womanhood during the Lost Cause era, while also revealing that, for all of Dixon’s pronouncements regarding white unity, a closer look at his work reveals a fundamental disdain for poor whites that, while lacking the outright violence against blacks we see in his works, nevertheless bears a resemblance to the racist language meted out against blacks. Analysis of Sutton Griggs, whose novel The Hindered Hand responds to Dixon directly, further challenges the latter's racist assumptions.

Maimed Souls

The conclusion gestures toward hope for the future of studies regarding poor whites and white trash, noting that work remains to be done, especially in the way that mental or physical disability is often presented as a form of inferior whiteness. Flannery O'Connor's work, for example, gestures toward the importance of these issues. In the closing pages, the conclusion also expresses hope that new avenues of southern literature, such as the rise of Asian American authors writing about the South, receives increased attention. Finally, the conclusion considers the 2016 election and the attention paid to the rural and urban divide and its relationship to how contemporary discourse considers poor whites as a racial other. It closes by noting that the idea that prejudice against poor whites is strictly a southern phenomenon has been complicated in recent years, and that both southern studies and whiteness studies are continually evolving fields of inquiry.

Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic Science Fiction

Where convention categorizes southern literature as especially preoccupied with the past, Doug Davis reads O’Connor’s stories as science fiction, highlighting the surprising extent of her engagement with futurism. From time travelers to space cadets to cyborgs, O’Connor’s stories are filled with images and characters that appear in popular science fiction. Davis argues that for O’Connor, the vocabulary of science fiction provides a way to both explore and critique the promises and effects of technological progress in the context of Cold War America.

Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor’s work can be unsettling to read, inviting a wide range of responses because of her peculiar mixture of violence, grace, and humor. However, a few persistent readerly habits have shaped popular and critical understandings of Flannery O’Connor, overly narrowing interpretations of her work. This collection seeks to disrupt those habits, reconsidering a giant of southern literature in a range of ways. The essays featured here begin with new methodologies, including object-oriented ontology and "crip-queer" theory, among others. Some essays in this collection introduce new contexts, like gothic science fiction, by way of approaching O’Connor. Others draw out unlikely comparisons with writers not normally considered alongside O’Connor, including Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, and Sylvia Plath. And in the final section, two essays reevaluate familiar arguments regarding O’Connor’s legacy, both in terms of her legal estate and as a formative figure in the rise of the creative writing workshop. Thus, this volume pursues questions that productively complicate the commonplace assumptions of O’Connor scholarship while also circling back to some old questions that are due for new attention.

Lee Smith

Born in Grundy, Virginia, in the coalfields of the southwestern section of the state, Lee Smith depicts an Appalachia steeped in family and community relationships, in supernatural and religious powers, and in musical and cultural traditions through which characters navigate a changing and modernizing world. Smith attended Hollins College, then a women’s college. While there, she studied with Louis Rubin, a leading scholar of southern literature; her classmates included a remarkable number of women who, like Smith, went on to pursue literary careers—for example, author Annie Dillard and literary scholars Lucinda MacKethon and Anne Goodwin Jones....