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A Backward GlanceThe Southern Renascence, the Autobiographical Epic, and the Classical LegacyMillichap, Joseph R. Cloth Edition, $39.95Short Cloth ISBN: 1-57233-659-5 Status: In Print Publication Date: 1/20/2009 
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Description“I think that this book will have a wide appeal, and not just to students of southern literature. . . . Millichap's work extends the observation that classical studies offer an increasingly substantial challenge to the hegemony of the Adamic myth, which has, until very recently, governed the field of American studies.” —John C. Shields, author of The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self“This book will be extremely interesting to all scholars of the Southern Renaissance and quite useful to teachers and to both upper-division undergraduate and graduate students.” —Charlotte H. Beck, author of Robert Penn Warren, Critic This is the first book-length work to examine how major figures of southern literary modernism-Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Thomas Wolfe-refigured elements of classicism in the Southern Renascence. Specifically, Joseph Millichap demonstrates how these writers created modernist fiction and poetry even as they were indebted to classical languages, themes, structures, and genres. The title refers to Allen Tate's formulation: “With the war of 1914-1918, the South reentered the world-but gave a backward glance as it stepped over the border; that backward glance gave us the Southern Renascence, a literature conscious of the past in the present.” A Backward Glance begins by establishing the historical background of the Southern Renascence and the theoretical contexts of the autobiographical epic in relation to the classical legacy of the southern modernist movement. For Millichap the autobiographical epic is a trope-not a genre-a text, or a group of texts that re-creates the personal life of its author in narrative structures ordered, to some extent, by allusion to or intertextuality with the ancient epos or mythos, while still locating both the life and work within the contexts of their contemporary culture. Devoting a chapter to each author, Millichap considers works of writers that exemplify the confluences of the autobiographical epic and the classical legacy within the framework of the Southern Renascence. Extrapolating from these seven writers and their selected works to more recent southern literature, Millichap adds an epilogue that ponders the continuing significance of the Southern Renascence, the autobiographical epic, and the classical legacy for today's “post-southernism.” Joseph R. Millichap is emeritus professor of English at Western Kentucky University. He is the author of Robert Penn Warren: A Study of the Short Fiction and Dixie Limited: Railroads, Culture, and the Southern Renaissance. | |
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