Оңтүстік АҚШ әдебиетінің қайта жаңаруы: 1920-1930 жылдардағы өркендеуі

Reinvigoration of Southern US literature in the 1920s–30s

The Southern Renaissance (also known as Southern Renascence) was the reinvigoration of American Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s with the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Caroline Gordon, Margaret Mitchell, Katherine Anne Porter, Erskine Caldwell, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others.

Prior to this renaissance, white Southern writers tended to focus on historical romances about the "Lost Cause" of the Confederate States of America. This writing glorified the heroism of the Confederate army and civilian population during the Civil War and the supposedly idyllic culture that existed in the South before the war (known as the Antebellum South). The belief in the heroism and morality of the South's "Lost Cause" was a driving force in Southern literature between the Civil War and World War I. The Southern Renaissance changed this by addressing three major themes in their works. The first was the burden of history in a place where many people still remembered slavery, Reconstruction, and a devastating military defeat. The second theme was to focus on the South's conservative culture, specifically on how an individual could exist without losing a sense of identity in a region where family, religion, and community were more highly valued than one's personal and social life. The final theme that the renaissance writers approached was the South's troubled history in regards to racial issues. Because of these writers' distance from the Civil War and slavery, they were able to bring more objectivity to writings about the South. They also brought new modernistic techniques such as stream of consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their works (as Faulkner did in his novel As I Lay Dying). Among the writers of the Southern Renaissance, William Faulkner is arguably the most influential and famous. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949.

The start of the Southern Renaissance is often traced back to the activities of "The Fugitives", a group of poets and critics who were based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, just after the First World War. The group included John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Laura Riding and others. Together they created the magazine The Fugitive (1922–1925), so named because the editors announced that they fled "from nothing faster than from the high caste Brahmins of the Old South."

The emergence of the Southern Renaissance as a literary and cultural movement has also been seen as a consequence of the opening up of the predominantly rural South to outside influences due to the industrial expansion that took place in the region during and after the First World War. Southern opposition to industrialization was expressed in the famous essay collection I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), written by authors and critics from the Southern Renaissance who came to be known as Southern Agrarians.

Many Southern writers of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s were inspired by the writers of the Southern Renaissance, including Reynolds Price, James Dickey, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, John Kennedy Toole, Carson McCullers, and Harper Lee (whose novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961), along with many others.