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Article: Writing Southern fiction.
- Article from:
- The Literary Review
- Article date:
- June 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Fairleigh Dickinson University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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If southern novels are a distinctive sub-genre of American literature, it is because the South as a region is distinctly different from the rest of the country. It is different in its geographical, climatic, and demographical features; it is different in its history and customs and, still, in many of its attitudes. But it is perhaps most of all different in its relative cohesiveness, the social frameworks that Southerners hand down, without thinking too much about it, from father to son and mother to daughter. I have no statistics on such societal inheritance, nor most probably does anyone else. But I would bet on the likelihood that in no other part of the country are there ...