Dionysus in Dixie: Studies in Southern Modernism

Ashley Brown and Frances Neel Cheney, eds. The Poetry Reviews of Allen Tate, 1924-1944. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. 214 + xii pp. Robert S. Dupree. Allen Tate and the Augustinian Imagination. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. 247 + xv pp. Walter B. Edgar, ed. A Southern Renascence Man: Views of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. 116 + xiv pp. Rose Ann C. Fraistat. Caroline Gordon as Novelist and Woman of Letters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. 181 pp. James A. Grimshaw, Jr., ed. Robert Penn Warren's "Brother to Dragons": A Discussion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. 309 pp. Katherine Snipes. Robert Penn Warren. New York: Ungar, 1984. 195 + xi pp. Sally Wood, ed. Foreword by Andrew Lytle. The Southern Mandarins: Letters of Caroline Gordon to Sally Wood, 1924-1937. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. 218 + xx pp. According to Virginia Woolf, "in or about December, 1910, human character changed."1 Whether or not Woolf is correct, there can be little doubt that in the early years of this century many intellectuals felt the historical and metaphysical discontinuity to be greater than at any time since the rise of Christianity. With the sort of generational arrogance that comes with such an attitude, the artists of this era spoke of an esthetic "modernism." (As one might expect, this movement has been supplanted by "post-modernism," which will no doubt give way to even more revolutionary innovations—say, new wave or punk lit.) As dated as the term may seem, we are stuck with modernism to refer to the literary angst of the World War I era. When this angst afflicted such a traditional society as the American South, the melancholy was predictably greater and the response more desperate than in the more cosmopolitan outposts of the waste land.