Chapter 14 - Women Writers and the Southern Renaissance; or, the Work of Gender in Literary Periodization

Summary

Following Carol S. Manning’s argument that “the real beginning” of the Southern Renaissance anticipates by a generation or more the standard dating of the phenomenon to the post-World War I decade, this chapter links the achievements of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century women writers who were instrumental in guiding the region’s literature and art into intellectual modernity, to a distinguished interwar cohort of women authors who inherited and extended their predecessors’ critique of the American South. It situates figures like Kate Chopin, Pauline Hopkins, Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells, Mary Noialles Murfree, Anna Julia Cooper, Helen Keller, and Ellen Glasgow as inaugurators of a “long Renascence” that reaches from the 1880s to the 1950s to include now-canonical authors like Katherine Anne Porter, Nella Larsen, Caroline Gordon, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Lillian Smith, alongside lesser-studied writers like Julia Peterkin, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Evelyn Scott, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Frances Newman, Grace Lumpkin, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.