The impulses that fired the Southern Literary Renaissance echoed
the impetus behind the Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the
twentieth century, when Ireland sought to demonstrate its cultural
equality with any European nation and disentangle itself from
English-imposed stereotypes. Seeking to prove that the South was
indeed the cultural equal of greater America, despite the harsh
realities of political defeat, economic scarcity, and racial
strife, Southern writers embarked on a career to re-imagine the
American South and to re-invent literary criticism. Transatlantic
Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South traces
the influence of the Irish Revival upon the Southern Renaissance,
exploring how the latter looked to the former for guidance,
artistic innovation, and models for self-invention and regional
renovation.While Deleuze and Guattari's model for minor literature
refers to minority or regional authors who work within a major
language for purposes of subversion, Artuso modifies their term
along generic and thematic lines to refer to errant female
juveniles within subsidiary genres whose nonconformist development
threatens to disrupt the dominant patriarchal culture of a region
or nation. Using the themes of initiation and maturation to anchor
the book, Artuso analyzes how the volatile development of young
women in revivalist texts often reflects or questions larger growth
pangs and patterns, including the evolution of the literary revival
itself and the development of a regional minority group that must
work within a dominant culture, language, and nation while seeking
methods of subversion. With minor literature as the container for
undervalued genres such as popular fiction and short stories-often
considered an author's juvenilia-this work investigates not only
how these texts challenge the authoritative claims of the novel,
but also scrutinizes the renaissance trope of female rebirth, as
the revivalists often figured cultural, national, or regional
regeneration through the metamorphoses or maturation of female
protagonists such as Cathleen ni Houlihan, Scarlett O'Hara, and
Virgie Rainey. Drawing upon New Historical, New Critical, and
postcolonial approaches, Artuso examines works by Lady Gregory,
Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Toomer, and
James Joyce.
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