SOURCE: Spivey, Ted R. “The City and the Quest for Cultural Values.” In Revival: Southern Writers in the Modern City, pp. 12-37. Gainsville: University Presses of Florida, 1986.

In the following essay, Spivey presents an overview of the role of the city in Southern life and the Southern literary imagination, noting that the South has traditionally—and mistakenly—been regarded as an agricultural society.

Like literary artists throughout Western civilization, many southern writers in the early twentieth century went to large cities to practice their art in order to escape increasing narcissistic and solipsistic tendencies in the provinces. To a greater extent than most other Western cultures the provinces of the South were caught up in an encompassing narcissism, a result of the persistent tendency of southern cultural leaders to look back to the largely imagined glory of the antebellum past. As Arnold Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin, and other scholar-philosophers...