The Irony of Southern Modernism

In the first half of the 20th century, the US South lagged behind the Northeast in social and economic development, but in the 1920s and 1930s writers from the US South produced texts that used modernist aesthetic forms to depict poor, rural living conditions. This essay argues that ruralism in the South was a product of modernization, and that cultural development in southern literature preceded modernization, yielding texts that employ a discontinuous narrative technique to depict the rural regions, such as William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Website: http://www.arjonline.org/social-sciences-and-humanities/american-research-journal-of-history-and-culture/