Dixie Limited: Railroads, Culture, and the Southern Renaissance

by Joseph R. Millichap

Overview

In the South, railroads have two meanings: they are an economic force that can sustain a town and they are a metaphor for the process of southern industrialization. Recognizing this duality, Joseph Millichap's Dixie Limited is a detailed reading of the complex and often ambivalent relationships among technology, culture, and literature that railroads represent in selected writers and works of the Southern Renaissance. Tackling such Southern Renaissance giants as Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and William Faulkner, Millichap mingles traditional American and Southern studies—in their emphases on literary appreciation and evaluation in terms of national and regional concerns—with contemporary cultural meaning in terms of gender, race, and class.

Millichap juxtaposes Faulkner's semi-autobiographical families with Wolfe's fiction, which represents changing attitudes toward the "Southern Other." Faulkner's later fiction is compared to that of Warren, Welty, and Ellison, and Warren's later poetry moves toward the contemporary post-Southernism of Dave Smith. These disparate examples suggest the subject of the final chapter—the continuing search for post-Southern patterns of persistence and change that reiterate, reject, and perhaps reconfigure the Southern Renaissance. As we enter the twenty-first century, that we recall how much the twentieth-century South was shaped by railroads built in the nineteenth century. It is also important that we recognize how much our future will be determined by the technological and cultural tracks we lay.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813122342
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	03/14/2002
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Joseph R. Millichap, professor of English at Western Kentucky University, is the author of four books, including Robert Penn Warren.

Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
1.	Railroads, Culture, and the Southern Renaissance	1
2.	William Faulkner's Cultural History: Railroads in the Sartoris Fictions	24
3.	Thomas Wolfe's Southern Railroads: Look Homeward, Angel and Beyond	36
4.	William Faulkner's Cultural Geography: Railroads in Go Down, Moses	48
5.	Robert Penn Warren's Modern Fictive Railroads: All the King's Men and Others	61
6.	Eudora Welty's Real and Recreated Railroads: Delta Wedding	73
7.	Ralph Ellison's Railroad Passages: Before Invisible Man and After	87
8.	Robert Penn Warren's Postmodern Poetic Railroads: Ballads and Recollections	100
9.	Dave Smith's Post-Southern Railroad Poetry: The Roundhouse Voices	112
10.	Railroads, Culture, the Southern Renaissance, and Post-Southernism	124
	Works Cited	135
	Index	141

Editorial Reviews

In a study he says is not shaped by particular cultural or literary theories, Millichap (English, Western Kentucky U.) looks at the complex and often ambivalent relation and resonance among technology, culture, and literature as represented by selected writers and works of the Southern Renaissance between the world wars. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews