SOURCE: Gilman, Jr., Owen W. “Regenerative Violence; or, Grab Your Saber, Ray.” In Vietnam and the Southern Imagination, pp. 77-93. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Gilman underscores the significant role of violence in Barry Hannah's fiction and surveys his Vietnam War short stories from a Southern perspective.

In an early overview of Hannah's fiction, Donald R. Noble noted in “‘Tragic and Meaningful to an Insane Degree’: Barry Hannah” [Southern Literary Journal 15, no. 1 (fall 1982)] that “Hannah's violence is a subject sure to get much attention in the future” (40); more recently, Allen Shepherd's study, “‘Firing Two Carbines, One in Each Hand’: Barry Hannah's Hey Jack,” [Notes on Mississippi Writers 21, no. 1 (1989)] focuses directly on Hannah's violence in the context of southern culture. Again and again in a career that includes nine books between 1972 and the present, Barry Hannah has placed violence of various kinds at the center...