Shame of the Southland: Violence and the Selling of the Visceral South

Authors

Sarah E. Gardner, Mercer University

Files

Description

The story of Violence—a novel that failed—tells us as much about the literary marketplace as the stories of those more familiar novels that came to dominate the national discourse about the problem South during the late-1920s and 1930s. It tells us about a crusading writing team -- socialist Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, son of Russian-Jewish émigrés, and his wife, Marcet, the niece of social reformer Jane Addams and herself a feminist -- that imagined it could reform the South through print; it tells us about a publisher’s fantasies of a region that had been exoticized for much of its history; and it tells us about the limits of a narrative strategy that sought to combine a reformist impulse with outlandish sensationalized content. Perhaps most importantly, Violence reminds us that a literary canon represents a small percentage of titles that were actually published. It thus encourages us to ask what we might find if we shift our gaze away from those works that command our attention to those titles that lived short and inconspicuous lives.

Publication Date

1-28-2019

Relational Format

journal article

Recommended Citation

Gardner, Sarah E., "Shame of the Southland: Violence and the Selling of the Visceral South" (2019). Study the South. 13.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studythesouth/13

Accessibility Status

Searchable text