SOURCE: Raper, Julius Rowan. “Inventing Modern Southern Fiction: A Postmodern View.” Southern Literary Journal 22, no. 2 (spring 1990): 3-18.

In the following essay, Raper explores the special role of a sense of place in traditional Southern fiction and suggests that postmodern Southern writers have deliberately reacted against their locale as a limitation in their works.

The possibility I want to explore,¹ that in modern Southern literature the sense of place takes on a role better played by a sense of self, arises from my irritation with a popular anthology of modern Southern short stories. The anthology, Stories of the Modern South, is a useful collection, as a supplement to novels or to a major anthology. It helps especially, we will see, with current writers like Doris Betts, Elizabeth Spencer, David Madden. But when I come to the selection for John Barth, I pause. And I become irritated. Not rageful, for...