Critical Essay | Critical Review by Kathryn McKee

Critical Review by Kathryn McKee

SOURCE: McKee, Kathryn. “Old Roots, New Routes.” Women's Review of Books 16, nos. 10–11 (July 1999): 27–28.

In the following review, McKee favorably compares Mason's Clear Springs to the genre of the traditional Southern autobiography.

At the end of a century in which telling your own story—particularly your own Southern story laced alternately with rage and ambivalence—has been high fashion, Bobbie Ann Mason does something different. She does not talk about race or idealize a way of life that never existed. She does not confront the reader with a poverty-stricken, emotionally barren youth, and she does not paint the moment she became a writer as her escape from a Southern self that was stifling a better one. Her writing is not an agonizing exploration of her past, but a powerful and beautifully articulated retelling of that exploration, a sharing with the reader of the process that has allowed her to...
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