Dixie Limited

by Millichap, Joseph R.

• ISBN13: 9780813122342
• ISBN10: 0813122341
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-03-14
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kentucky

Summary

" In the South, railroads have two meanings: they are an economic force that can sustain a town and they are a metaphor for the process of southern industrialization. Recognizing this duality, Joseph Millichap's Dixie Limited is a detailed reading of the complex and often ambivalent relationships among technology, culture, and literature that railroads represent in selected writers and works of the Southern Renaissance. Tackling such Southern Renaissance giants as Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and William Faulkner, Millichap mingles traditional American and Southern studies -- in their emphases on literary appreciation and evaluation in terms of national and regional concerns -- with contemporary cultural meaning in terms of gender, race, and class. Millichap juxtaposes Faulkner's semi-autobiographical families with Wolfe's fiction, which represents changing attitudes toward the "Southern Other." Faulkner's later fiction is compared to that of Warren, Welty, and Ellison, and Warren's later poetry moves toward the contemporary post-Southernism of Dave Smith. These disparate examples suggest the subject of the final chapter -- the continuing search for post-Southern patterns of persistence and change that reiterate, reject, and perhaps reconfigure the Southern Renaissance. As we enter the twenty-first century, that we recall how much the twentieth-century South was shaped by railroads built in the nineteenth century. It is also important that we recognize how much our future will be determined by the technological and cultural tracks we lay.

Author Biography

Joseph R. Millichap, professor of English at Western Kentucky University, is the author of four books, including Robert Penn Warren, and many essays and articles

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Railroads, Culture, and the Southern Renaissance	1	(23)
William Faulkner's Cultural History: Railroads in the Sartoris Fictions	24	(12)
Thomas Wolfe's Southern Railroads: Look Homeward, Angel and Beyond	36	(12)
William Faulkner's Cultural Geography: Railroads in Go Down, Moses	48	(13)
Robert Penn Warren's Modern Fictive Railroads: All the King's Men and Others	61	(12)
Eudora Welty's Real and Recreated Railroads: Delta Wedding	73	(14)
Ralph Ellison's Railroad Passages: Before Invisible Man and After	87	(13)
Robert Penn Warren's Postmodern Poetic Railroads: Ballads and Recollections	100	(12)
Dave Smith's Post-Southern Railroad Poetry: The Roundhouse Voices	112	(12)
Railroads, Culture, the Southern Renaissance, and Post-Southernism	124	(11)
Works Cited	135	(6)
Index	141