Southern literature

John L. Stewart offers a helpful summary of what makes Southern literature particularly Southern. It goes beyond mere "local color", and at bottom tends toward a certain "image of man" that is

at once essential and definitive and it constitutes the special contribution of contemporary Southern writing to American literature....it is stoutly anti-progressive, anti-rationalist, and anti-humanist, for it insists on the irreducible mystery in life, the all-pervasiveness of evil in human affairs, and the limitations of man's capacity to understand and control his environment and his own nature. Rejecting modern conceptions of evil as a finite and merely temporary absence of physical and psychical adjustment and ease, the writers of the Southern Renaissance present it in figures going back at last to the Old Testament, the doctrine of Original Sin, and the Protestant habit of searching the private heart....

In its conception of sin it bears similarities to the New England authors "from Woolman and Edwards to Hawthorne and Melville," but it is still distinctively Southern, in part (as Flannery O'Connor said) "because we lost the War."

[B]orn in a land that had undergone defeat in war, they had that special sense of the past possible only in people compelled to search the record of agony, humiliation, and loss asking "Why?"....Thus the image was projected not only in religious terms, but in historic as well. And the view of history was curiously bifocal: because of the mystery, the lack of human control, the ambiguity, life to them was a flux and blur of persistent change within time; yet life was also outside time and changeless because man, for whom progress was not possible, was always the same beneath the shifting, temporal surface. In short, their image of man was mythopoeic, and insofar as their writing embodies much or all of that image...one may call these writers...Southern.

(All quotes except the O'Connor tag are from John L. Stewart, The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 41-42.)

This description seems to match up pretty well with my own (very moderate) reading in Southern literature. But I think there is much more behind the unique Southern "sense of the past" than simply the War. While that certainly focused and intensified the glance backward, a strong feeling of history, tradition, and inheritance are major parts of the antebellum sensibility. In general, I am of the opinion that, except for the despair, the Southern writers came honestly by whatever made their writing peculiarly Southern. (But even their despair is rooted in Southern odes of thought: the acknowledgement of sin, the embrace of mankind's limits, etc.)