Hearts of Darkness
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A01=Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Author_Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Category=DSBF
Category=JM
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Product details
- ISBN 9780807128442
- Weight: 333g
- Dimensions: 154 x 227mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2002
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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From Edgar Allan Poe's ""dark forebodings"" to Kate Chopin's lifelong struggle with sorrow and loss, depression has shadowed southern letters. This beautifully realised study explores the defining role of melancholy in southern literature from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, when it evolved into modernist alienation.
While creativity and depression have been linked throughout Western history, Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that nineteenth-century southern culture was hospitable to a distinctive melancholy that impelled literary production. Deeply marked by high death rates, social dread, and bitter defeat, white southerners imposed a climate of parochial pride, stifling conventions of masculinity, social condescension, and mistrust of intellectualism. Many writers experienced a conscious or unconscious alienation from the prevailing social currents. And they expressed emotional turmoil in and through their writing.
Hearts of Darkness develops original insights into the lives and creative impulses of both major and more obscure writers. Discussing individuals as diverse as William Gilmore Simms, Mark Twain, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Sidney Lanier, and Ellen Glasgow, Wyatt-Brown identifies a close association between creativity and psychological distress. This connection helps to explain southern literary engrossment with defeat and violence, together with a disposition for the romantic, gothic, and grotesque styles, well before William Faulkner and the male Southern Renaissance. Wyatt-Brown also finds that the first authors to break away from the sentimental modes to explore new psychological terrain were women whose depression ironically furnished them with critical dispassion. Imaginative detachment in writers such as Willa Cather enabled them to create luminous characters and settings while heralding literary modernism.
A major reinterpretation of the South's fertile literary culture, Hearts of Darkness intensifies our regard for both southern writers and the fruits of pen and paper.
While creativity and depression have been linked throughout Western history, Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that nineteenth-century southern culture was hospitable to a distinctive melancholy that impelled literary production. Deeply marked by high death rates, social dread, and bitter defeat, white southerners imposed a climate of parochial pride, stifling conventions of masculinity, social condescension, and mistrust of intellectualism. Many writers experienced a conscious or unconscious alienation from the prevailing social currents. And they expressed emotional turmoil in and through their writing.
Hearts of Darkness develops original insights into the lives and creative impulses of both major and more obscure writers. Discussing individuals as diverse as William Gilmore Simms, Mark Twain, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Sidney Lanier, and Ellen Glasgow, Wyatt-Brown identifies a close association between creativity and psychological distress. This connection helps to explain southern literary engrossment with defeat and violence, together with a disposition for the romantic, gothic, and grotesque styles, well before William Faulkner and the male Southern Renaissance. Wyatt-Brown also finds that the first authors to break away from the sentimental modes to explore new psychological terrain were women whose depression ironically furnished them with critical dispassion. Imaginative detachment in writers such as Willa Cather enabled them to create luminous characters and settings while heralding literary modernism.
A major reinterpretation of the South's fertile literary culture, Hearts of Darkness intensifies our regard for both southern writers and the fruits of pen and paper.
Bertram Wyatt-Brown is the author of Southern Honor, The House of Percy, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners, and The Shaping of Southern Culture, among other books. Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida and past president of the Southern Historical Association, he won the Jefferson Davis Memorial Award and was a finalist for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His honors also include fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other institutions.
