Dangerous Innocence

White Men, Mass Culture, and the Southern Outsider's Appeal, 1960–2020

William P. Murray, Scott Romine

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780807181553
• eBook ISBN: 9780807182123
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Dangerous Innocence investigates how prevailing constructions of white masculinity in the U.S. South help feed and reinforce systems of racial inequity. Tracing the rise of the "southern outsider" in literature and on television from 1960 to 2020, William P. Murray probes white Americans' enduring desire to assert their own blamelessness even though such acts of self-justification facilitate continued violence against historically oppressed populations. Dangerous Innocence courses from popular television such as The Andy Griffith Show and The Waltons through influential fiction by Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other prominent southern authors—alongside forceful challenges voiced by Black writers including Chester Himes and Ernest Gaines—before turning to works created after the September 11 attacks that reinscribe cultural logics predicated on protecting white innocence and power. Concluding on a note of praxis, Dangerous Innocence argues that reattaching southern outsiders to a communal identity encourages an honest assessment about what whiteness represents and what it means to belong to a nation steeped in commitments to white supremacy.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction: Constructing Innocence
• 1 Desiring Dixie: Television and the Rise of the White, Southern Outsider
• 2 Switching the Patient: White Southern Doctors and Their Prescriptions
• 3 Seeing the Lynching Ropes: The Rejection of White Postsouthern Innocence
• 4 Searching for Innocence: The Age of Terror and the Outsider’s Return to Community
• 5 Building on New Foundations: The Search for Something Different
• Conclusion: Embracing Crosshatched Histories
• NOTES
• WORKS CITED
• INDEX