Matthew Guinn
After Southern Modernism: Fiction of the Contemporary South
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Pp. 202. $18.00

Reviewed by Axel Knoenagel

Southern fiction forms an important part of twentieth-century American literature. The figure of William Faulkner looms large over any piece of literature written south of the Mason-Dixon line. Other authors such as Eudora Welty, Allen Tate, or Walker Percy are almost equally unavoidable points of reference and comparison. These authors share--in terms of content--a strong affinity to the traditions of the plantation South and--in terms of artistry--a solid footing in modernism.

The modernist age of southern fiction ended some time ago. Younger authors have taken the stage, but they are faced with the challenge of having to develop individual profiles that distinguish them from the patterns shaped by their predecessors. Matthew Guinn describes the new generation of novelists that has established itself during the last thirty years in his study After Southern Modernism: Fiction of the Contemporary South. Guinn's discussion of nine authors demonstrates that the present generation has emancipated itself from the seemingly overwhelming modernist heritage. "With the old myths dead and naturalism on the rise," Guinn argues, "the problem of cultural decay has become paramount--it has become the issue to be addressed by the present generation of southern writers" (xxvii).

The works of Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, and Larry Brown demonstrate that the aristocratic society and its aesthetics have ceased to function as models. Fiction about the poor white population never had a significant place in modernist writing (Eudora Welty's Losing Battles forming the notable exception), and neither did the perspective of naturalism so successfully taken by Larry Brown. Guinn argues convincingly that "the fiction they created from personal experience has in fact worked to deconstruct such [traditional] conceptions of southern culture" which still makes up most of the region's cultural image (3). Equally significant for Guinn's argument is Bobbie Ann Mason, whose "contribution to southern literature is one of a historical consciousness imbued with an uncommon instinct for realism" (73).

Kaye Gibbons and Randall Kenan demonstrate that southern literature has broadened not only socially and stylistically but also with regard to gender. Gibbons's novels "pay obeisance to the tropes of southern modernism while nonetheless advancing an interpretation of southern culture as the product of an invidious patriarchy" (57). This perspective, Guinn argues, "undermines the foundation of the myth" (88). The writing of Randall Kenan is equally contrary to southern literary tradition because of the author's identity. As an African-American and as a homosexual, Kenan is as far removed from southern cultural traditions as seems possible. Consequently, his writing, influenced by James Baldwin rather than southern fiction, constitutes "a postmodern work that uses iconoclasm and intertextuality to fashion a radical reappraisal of black and gay identity in the contemporary South" (150).

The authors mentioned so far define themselves more or less independently of tradition. More important, however, are those authors who write in conscious relationship to tradition. Guinn has singled out Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, and Barry Hannah for more detailed analysis. In McCarthy's Suttree Guinn sees as central that "mythopoeia is replaced with mythoclasm" to create "a fully realized postmodern vision of the South" in which "the past menaces rather than informs" (103). Barry Hannah's significance becomes evident in his subversion of the Civil War as one of the central factors of the southern myth.

Richard Ford emerges as the most important contemporary southern writer. Guinn characterizes him as "a lapsed modern among the ruins of modernist culture" (130). Contrasting Ford with the last great southern modernist, Walker Percy, Guinn argues that "in his postmodern renderings of the motifs of Renascence fiction, Ford indicates a new direction for the southern expatriate and concomitantly a new style for the postsouthern writer" (119). Guinn concludes that "in waiving the opportunity to continue the Götterdämmerung in his own work, Ford declares a … kind of independence--from Percy and from the southern literary tradition in general" (137).

Southern literature has survived the end of the modernist era. Matthew Guinn demonstrates that contemporary southern fiction is successful at mastering the new challenge, which is "no longer how to present the region to the larger world but how to bring that larger world into the demesne of southern letters" (184-85). At times one wishes that Guinn had devoted more space to the authors he discusses. But the study convinces as a survey and provides interesting avenues for further consideration.