World War I Literary Modernism And The Us South

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between social history and the geographic spread of modernism. Many critics have noted the irony that writers from the South-the nation's poorest and most illiterate region in the first half of the twentieth century-cultivated an unexpected literary flowering between World War I and World War II. I argue that World War I acted as a pivotal catalytic event, ending the post- Reconstruction South's self-imposed intellectual isolation and allowing for the diffusion of modern American and European social, cultural, and economic practices into the region, thus shifting the region's economic base from agriculture to industry and moving the region's intellectual superstructure from regionalism to modernism. In five chapters I examine the representation of World War I in modernist texts by southern and non-southern writers. The first two chapters analyze changes in the demographic and economic foundation of southern culture, connecting the war as a vehicle for interregional cultural exchange to William Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay and short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald and tracing the emergence of mechanization and industrialization in Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground and Faulkner's Flags in the Dust. The three subsequent chapters examine the effects of infrastructural change on major elements of southern society, exploring the effects of war-time patriotism on sectional ideology in William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee and Donald Davidson's The Tall Men, analyzing the war's impact on the struggle for civil rights in Walter White's The Fire in the Flint and Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, and discussing the representation of southern womanhood in post-World War I southern women's fiction.