In this succinct study, Scott Romine considers a key paradox that
has been associated with the concept of ""community"" from the
beginning of modern southern literary criticism: namely, that
communities often valued for their cohesiveness and moral stability
were at the same time sites of oppression along race and class
lines. How were communities so deeply divided able to maintain even
the appearance of organic cohesiveness? The Narrative Forms of
Southern Community contains close readings of five narratives,
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, John Pendleton
Kennedy's Swallow Barn, Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia,
William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee, and William
Faulkner's Light in August, that attempt to mediate or negotiate
the social tensions inherent in the stratified world they
represent. Whereas most earlier examinations of community are
thematically oriented, this study focuses on the formal structures,
framing techniques, narrative stylistics, master codes, and
collective plots, among others, that allow the narrative in
question to recover an image of an ideal social order. In
particular, this book traces the narrative strategies of deferral,
displacement, and evasion that enable what can be thought of as
""simulated consensus,"" a paradox that informs all of the works
under discussion. Romine, in arguing against the idea of community
as a group of like-minded individuals, suggests that community is
better conceived as a social group that, lacking a commonly held
view of reality, connects by means of norms, codes, and manners
that produce an artificial, or at least symbolically constituted,
social reality. Romine realises the complexity of the concept of
community and appreciates the challenges facing those who wrestle
with its questions. By exploring the various ways in which writers
associated with the cultural status quo attempt to rationalize the
oppressive nature of society, this first book-length study of
community in southern literature contributes greatly to current
revisionary reappraisals by going beyond many of the old
assumptions.
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