Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Richard Gray

Critical Essay by Richard Gray

SOURCE: Gray, Richard. “The New South, the Lost Cause, and the Recovered Dream.” In Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region, pp. 75-121. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Gray concentrates on developments in the literature of the New South from the romance and nostalgia of early writers, to the cultural expressions of Sidney Lanier's poetry and the autobiographical satire of Mark Twain.

Looking Before and After: Writers in the New South

If there was one thing most travellers in the South were agreed on just after the Civil War, it was that the old economic and political system of the region had broken down irretrievably. One observer, for instance, claimed to have seen “enough woe and want and ruin and ravage”, during a visit of fourteen weeks to Georgia and the Carolinas, “to satisfy the most insatiate heart”; “enough of sore humiliation and bitter overthrow”, he added, “to appease the desire of the most...
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