The literature within the Southern Renaissance embraced not only new subjects but also subjectivity, as these writers recognized the faults of the “Lost Cause” and sought to redefine what it meant to be a Southerner.
Leaders of the literary renaissance
Within this literary renaissance in the South, writers not only reflected on themes such as racism and conservatism, but they also began to experiment with how they wrote. These writers experimented with form, adopting modernist literary writing techniques like blending the likes of poetry, prose, and folklore, all in one piece of literature. They embraced such poetic inventions as free verse. These writers mixed genres and even experimented with stream of consciousness, a narrative method in which the character’s thought processes are indicated through interior monologue, oftentimes with the character leaping between thoughts. Punctuation is rarely present in this form of narration. Stream of consciousness allows the reader to participate in the literature, blurring the division between the character and the reader. By embracing new forms of writing, these writers were creating a redefined image of the South.
In the following section, we will look at three literary figures in the Southern Renaissance who embraced modern literary techniques and reflected on the moral dilemmas of the Old South: William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Robert Penn Warren.
William Faulkner and Absalom, Absalom!
Born in New Albany, Mississippi in 1897, William Faulkner wrote poems, novels, and short stories mostly based in his fictional county Yoknapatawpha County, inspired by Lafayette County, Mississippi, a region where Faulkner spent most of his life. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novels A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962) and is known as one of the greatest Southern writers of all time. He is also seen as a leader in the Southern Renaissance. In much of his work, Faulkner focuses on a post-Civil War South as his characters grapple with morality in a stifling, conservative society. He considers the themes of race relations, Southern traditions and society, trauma, and tragedy, among other themes, all discussed through his psychoanalytic prose and stream-of-consciousness writing style.
As a Southern Renaissance writer, Faulkner grappled with the South’s past and present and focused on truth rather than myth. According to Carl Rollyson in The Life of William Faulkner (2020), Faulkner focused much of his work on the South’s dark history and also on the South’s position in an ever-changing world:
