In the 1949 classic Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith
described three racial "ghosts" haunting the mind of the white
South: the black woman with whom the white man often had sexual
relations, the rejected child from a mixed-race coupling, and the
black mammy whom the white southern child first loves but then must
reject. In this groundbreaking work, Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.,
extends Smith's work by adding a fourth "ghost" lurking in the
psyche of the white South -- the specter of European Fascism. He
explores how southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s responded to
Fascism, and most tellingly to the suggestion that the racial
politics of Nazi Germany had a special, problematic relevance to
the South and its segregated social system.
As Brinkmeyer shows, nearly all white southern writers in these
decades felt impelled to deal with this specter and with the
implications for southern identity of the issues raised by Nazism
and Fascism. Their responses varied widely, ranging from repression
and denial to the repulsion of self-recognition. With penetrating
insight, Brinkmeyer examines the work of writers who contemplated
the connection between the authoritarianism and racial politics of
Nazi Germany and southern culture. He shows how white southern
writers -- both those writing cultural criticism and those writing
imaginative literature -- turned to Fascist Europe for images,
analogies, and metaphors for representing and understanding the
conflict between traditional and modern cultures that they were
witnessing in Dixie.
Brinkmeyer considers the works of a wide range of authors of
varying political stripes: the Nashville Agrarians, W. J. Cash,
Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, William
Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn
Warren, and Lillian Hellman. He argues persuasively that by
engaging in their works the vital contemporary debates about
totalitarianism and democracy, these writers reconfigured their
understanding not only of the South but also of themselves as
southerners, and of the nature and significance of their art.
The magnum opus of a distinguished scholar, The Fourth Ghost
offers a stunning reassessment of the cultural and political
orientation of southern literature by examining a major and
heretofore unexplored influence on its development.
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