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Ellen Glasgow |
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Ellen Glasgow is a transitional figure in Southern American literature. Having rebelled against inhibiting traditions in her society, she was also impelled to rebel against the literature which expresses the values of that society: the romantically inspired or the cautiously realistic depictions of Southern life in writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Mary N. Murfree, Mary Johnston, and James Lane Allen. She brought to the writing of Southern fiction the tenets of the late-nineteenth-century realism that was rooted aesthetically in the earlier theories and practice of Zola, Balzac, Maupassant, Flaubert, and the great English novelists--Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy, and philosophically in Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers. The result was a corpus of novels that depicted more honestly the actualities of Southern history and experience than had heretofore been the rule. In effect, Ellen Glasgow introduced into Southern writing the predilections, preoccupations, and themes that those who followed her were to develop still further: a realistic presentation of the rural lower and middle classes and of the manners and values of the urban middle and upper classes; an analysis of the conflict between a traditional culture and the challenges brought to it by the industrialism of the New South and by the relativism of the modernist point of view; a sense of the decay and the graciousness associated with the past as opposed to a sense of the rootlessness and the iconoclasm associated with modernism; an appreciation of the mythic aspects of her regional culture; and a consciousness of the claims of heredity and environment as shaping factors upon temperament and character.
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