Disruption of the Traditional View of the Southern Past in Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Shiloh”

Abstract

A major aspect of what is termed Southern Renaissance literature in the US is known to be a striking obsession with the past. “The Southern writers of the postFirst World War age,” writes Lewis P. Simpson, “inaugurated a struggle to comprehend the nature of memory and history, and to assert the redemptive meaning of the classical-Christian past in its bearing on the present.” So, the “Southern literary mind . . . began to seek and to symbolize this antagonism in an image of recovery . . . of memory and history 70 . Such an obsession naturally brought with it a condemnation of modern times. Almost “all Southern novelists whose writings have appeared since World War I have criticized the emphasis modern society has placed on technology and consumer economics,” as Thomas Daniel Young puts it 1 . Thus, US Southern Renaissance fiction is characterized by its depiction of the tension, in Southern society, between tradition and modernity.