Abstract
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.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | A History of the Literature of the U.S. South |
Editors | Harilaos Stecopoulos |
Publisher | cambridge university press (cup) |
Publication date | 2021 |
Pages | 263-281 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781108491679 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781108666657 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© Cambridge University Press 2021.
Keywords
- Arna Bontemps
- Depression
- Federal Writers Project
- Great Migration
- Harlem Renaissance
- John Faulkner
- New Deal
- Popular Front
- Richard Wright
- Socialist realism
- Southern Renaissance
- William Faulkner
- Works Progress Administration
- WPA modernism
- Zora Neale Hurston