SOURCE: Cash, Erin E. Campbell. “Locating Community in Contemporary Southern Fiction: A Cultural Analysis of Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.” In Songs of the New South: Writing Contemporary Louisiana, edited by Suzanne Disheroon Green and Lisa Abney, pp. 37-45. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Cash explores the concept of community in Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain within the context of Southern literature.

The psychic blow of defeat in Vietnam shapes Southern survivors in ways similar to the effects of the idealized Lost Cause on Southern Renaissance writers. The influence of the cultural fallout subsequent to the Vietnam War is perhaps more pronounced in the South because of its historical affinity to noble loss. As the only defeated Americans until the Vietnam War, Southerners coped with this cultural and psychological rupture by unifying around a shared...