Book contents
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Fictions of the Native South
- Chapter 2 John Smith and the English Origins of Southern Exceptionalism
- Chapter 3 Plantation and Enlightenment
- Chapter 4 Geoconfederacy
- Chapter 5 In the Shadow of His Office
- Chapter 6 Shadows of Haiti
- Chapter 7 “Midnight Bakings” Amid Starvation
- Chapter 8 A Calculated Fiction
- Chapter 9 Maroons and Marronage in Antebellum African American Literature
- Chapter 10 Everyday Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century
- Chapter 11 Fables of the Bloody Shirt
- Chapter 12 A Heritage Unique in the Ages
- Chapter 13 Moonlight and Magnolias No More
- Chapter 14 Women Writers and the Southern Renaissance; or, the Work of Gender in Literary Periodization
- Chapter 15 Southern Geographies and New Negro Modernism
- Chapter 16 “A fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA”
- Chapter 17 Provincialism as a Positive Good
- Chapter 18 Faulkner’s Untimely Fiction
- Chapter 19 Reconsidering Du Bois’s “Central Text”
- Chapter 20 Cultural Activism and Theater of the Civil Rights Movement
- Chapter 21 Till the Hurt Becomes Music
- Chapter 22 Undead Sound
- Chapter 23 There Is No South
- Chapter 24 Hurricane Alley
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 16 - “A fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA”
Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, Bontemps, and the Depression South
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2021
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Fictions of the Native South
- Chapter 2 John Smith and the English Origins of Southern Exceptionalism
- Chapter 3 Plantation and Enlightenment
- Chapter 4 Geoconfederacy
- Chapter 5 In the Shadow of His Office
- Chapter 6 Shadows of Haiti
- Chapter 7 “Midnight Bakings” Amid Starvation
- Chapter 8 A Calculated Fiction
- Chapter 9 Maroons and Marronage in Antebellum African American Literature
- Chapter 10 Everyday Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century
- Chapter 11 Fables of the Bloody Shirt
- Chapter 12 A Heritage Unique in the Ages
- Chapter 13 Moonlight and Magnolias No More
- Chapter 14 Women Writers and the Southern Renaissance; or, the Work of Gender in Literary Periodization
- Chapter 15 Southern Geographies and New Negro Modernism
- Chapter 16 “A fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA”
- Chapter 17 Provincialism as a Positive Good
- Chapter 18 Faulkner’s Untimely Fiction
- Chapter 19 Reconsidering Du Bois’s “Central Text”
- Chapter 20 Cultural Activism and Theater of the Civil Rights Movement
- Chapter 21 Till the Hurt Becomes Music
- Chapter 22 Undead Sound
- Chapter 23 There Is No South
- Chapter 24 Hurricane Alley
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter considers how a range of U.S. southern writers with varying political views responded to the Depression and New Deal. It stresses that even when competing visions of and for the South were articulated by different “fronts” in the period’s “cultural wars,” such visions were not always reducible to left versus right, communism versus capitalism, or “Agrarian versus Industrial.” William Faulkner’s short fiction between 1941 and 1943 reveals complex, contradictory attitudes toward the New Deal, especially the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The writing of Zora Neale Hurston, including texts produced for the WPA’s Federal Writers Project, includes a critique of Jim Crow labor exploitation comparable to the work of her supposed antagonist (and fellow FWP author) Richard Wright. Arna Bontemps’s historical novels, especially Black Thunder (1936), approach Depression-era social upheaval allegorically by depicting earlier black laborers revolting against slavery in the U.S. South and the Caribbean.
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- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South , pp. 263 - 281Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021