1970Saul Bellow: Mr. Sammler’s Planet

1971John Updike: Rabbit ReduxWalker Percy: Love in the RuinsDon DeLillo: AmericanaBernard Malamud: The Tenants William H. Gass: Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife

1972John Barth: ChimeraRudolfo Anaya: Bless Me, UltimaChaim Potok: My Name Is Asher LevDon DeLillo: End Zone

1973Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s RainbowPhilip Roth: The Great American NovelJoyce Carol Oates: Do With Me What You Will

1974Joseph Heller: Something HappenedIshmael Reed: The Last Days of Louisiana RedGail Godwin: The Odd Woman

1975William Gaddis: JRE.L. Doctorow: RagtimeDonald Barthelme: The Dead FatherSaul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift

1976Don DeLillo: Ratner’s StarJoyce Carol Oates: ChildwoldJohn Hawkes: Travesty

1977Leslie Marmon Silko: CeremonyToni Morrison: Song of SolomonRobert Coover: A Public BurningWalker Percy: Lancelot

1978Don DeLillo: Running DogJohn Irving: The World According to Garp

1979Philip Roth: The Ghost WriterWilliam Styron: Sophie’s ChoiceBernard Malamud: Dubin’s LivesNorman Mailer: The Executioner’s Song

Southern FictionSouthern Fiction

1861-1865: “The War between the States”The Confederate States of America

1863-1877: ReconstructionReconstruction of state and society in the former Confederacy and the abolition of slavery

Class structure in Antebellum South

Southern aristocracy (plantation owners, slaveholders)

Slaves

Characteristic themes in Southern literature

History of the South

Family

Community

Racial tension

Religion

Class

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

“The Lost Cause of the Confederacy”

Nostalgic yearning for the Antebellum era

Thomas Nelson Page

Criticism of Antebellum nostalgia and racism

Charles W. Chesnutt

Kate Chopin(1850-1904)

The Awakening (1899)

Southern Renaissance1930s and 1940s

William Faulkner(1897-1962)

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

The first American representative of literary modernism

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Southern Renaissance1930s and 1940s

Thomas Wolfe(1900-1938)

Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

Of Time and the River (1935)

Southern Renaissance1930s and 1940s

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)

Robert Penn Warren(1905-1989)

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

Old Mortality(1937)

Night Rider(1939)

Their Eyes Were Watching God(1937)

Southern bestsellers

19361960

Further authors

Eudora Welty (1909-2001)Eudora Welty (1909-2001) Carson McCullers (1917-1967)Carson McCullers (1917-1967)

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)

Walker Percy (1916-1990)Walker Percy (1916-1990)

William Styron (1925-2006)William Styron (1925-2006)

Flannery O’Connor

“Good Country People” in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)

Mrs. Hopewell Mrs. Freeman

Joy “Hulga” [Hopewell] Glynese and Carramae

Ph.D. in Philosophy

Manly PointerBible salesman

What is the value of knowledge?Is it possible to believe in nothing(ness)?

What makes a person “good”?Is “perversion” immoral or amoral?

atheist

artificial leg

Further works by Flannery O’Connor

Wise Blood (1952)The Violent Bear It Away (1960)

Novels

Short story collections

A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955)Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)The Complete Stories (1971)

Walker Percy

Lancelot (1977)

References to the Arthurian legend

Lancelot Andrewes Lamar Percival

Robert Merlin

Quest for the “Unholy Grail” Third Revolution Proto-fascism

The degeneration of the “Southern gentleman”

Anachronism

The possibility of pure evil

Central themes:

Confession (Catholicism?) as a means to achieve salvation

Further works by Walker Percy

The Moviegoer (1961)

The Last Gentleman (1966)

Love in the Ruins (1971)

The Second Coming (1980)

The Thanatos Syndrome (1987)

Novels

William Styron

Lie Down in Darkness (1951)

The deconstruction of the family

Milton and Helen Loftis Daughters: Peyton and Maudie

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)Based on the slave revolt in Virginia in 1831Godly inspiration vs. human agency

Sophie’s Choice (1979)

Sophie Zawistowska’s “choice” on her arrival at Auschwitz

All three novels thematize the problematics of moral choice

Further works by William Styron

Set This House on Fire (1960)

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990)

A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth (1993)

Havanas in Camelot (posthumous; 2008)