| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,100,000)
Fiscal Year 2000: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 1999: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Literature of the American South in the 1920s is characterized by two major factors : a new generation intent on assimilating themselves to the new trend of modernism in Europe, and a movement toward what was to be called New Criticism, which, while asserting the autonomy of literature, tacitly reflected the aristocratic connoisseurism traditionally maintained in the white South. The former factor was typically active in Double Dealer, a little magazine in New Orleans, while the latter was made conspicuous by the manifesto T11 Take My Stand, compiled by the professors of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. However, the South in the 20s was experiencing a far greater social change than these two factors could correspond to successfully, from the so-called Great Migration of black people to the North, to the Depression at the end of the decade, and it brought as a result a literary as well as cultural confusion for which it was extremely difficult to find an outler. Southern Literature of that period, after all, depended on the imaginative capability of individual authors whose task it was to face the chaotic reality as seriously and inclusively as they could. In this context, three authors seemingly different from each other can be said to made acutest responses to the actuality of their home land : William Faulkner, who thematically adhered to his native Mississippi, Thomas Wolfe, who kept on writing about his North Carolina only critically, and J.J.Cash, who wrote a severe attack of Southern culture. They are usually treated separtely, Faulkner as a successful modernist, Wolfe as a failed autobiographer, and Cashi as a cultural historian ; but it seems now necessary to examine them in a single, common perspective, perspective of the tragic record of the changing South.
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