BOOK REVIEW: A BACKWARD GLANCE - The Southern Renascence, the Autobiographical Epic, and the Classical Legacy

leading Southern authors in the 20th century

A BACKWARD GLANCE - The Southern Renascence, the Autobiographical Epic, and the Classical Legacy by Joseph R. Millichap. U. of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, TN; www.utpress.org. 2009. 240+xvi pages. $39.95 hardcover, ISBN 978-1-57233-659-9. bibliography, index.

As in other fields of American letters, the Renascence in Southern writing was effected largely in terms of biographical writings. These were sometimes straightforward biographical writings such as essays or autobiographies. Usually though the writings were novels of thinly-disguised autobiography, most notably Thomas Wolfe's novels. And biography which was the medium for the Southern Renascence often took the dimension of regional literature, notably with William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon are other authors studied for their parts in the Renascence. While all have the stature of significant or major American authors, they are also known as Southern authors of a certain era. This was the era between the South in the few decades coming right after the Civil War and the modern-day South emerging in the years after World War II. The "backward glance" of the Southern Renascence was not essentially a nostalgic urge, but the way in which this generation of exceptionally talented Southern writers were trying to comprehend and come to terms with the historical and cultural currents at work throughout the South.

Millichap, an emeritus professor of English, starts off the literary critique with the thematic chapter "The Autobiographical Epic" exemplifying the mix of biography with classical form Wolfe, Faulkner, and the others struck upon and developed in their literary enterprise. No matter what forms favored by particular writers--e. g., poetry for Tate, short story for Welty--they all reflected autobiographical epic in varying degrees.

Millichap explains his unconventional use of the term "Renascence" instead of the familiar "Renaissance" for such an artistic enterprise of reinvigorating classical forms and ideas in a contemporary period by referring to Allen Tate's preference. Tate used this term in his 1945 essay The New Provincialism which gave Millichap a focus and theme for this book. "[T]he Latin etymology...probably appealed to Tate, perhaps the most Classical among his contemporaries, more than its evolution by way of French to its more customary spelling...." Besides, the two spellings have been used "somewhat interchangeably" among scholars.

Each of the major Southern authors is then taken up individually as to how he or she fed into the literary movement of the Renascence. As with any historical or literary concept or movement, the Southern Renascence was sprawling and loosely defined. It is not simply hypothetical or imaginary though. Before ending, Millichap points to examples in popular culture of the genuineness and continuation of the sources of the Renascence in Southern culture. These are undeniable in the idiosyncratic movies Big Fish and O Brother, Where Art Thou.