Description
"Reluctant Visionaries and Southern Others" focuses on southern narratives in literature and painting as sites of struggle over storytelling and audiences in the self-conscious invention and re-invention of the South. Lying just beneath the surface of white dominant narratives of communal unity are outlines of counter-narratives, alternative readings, resistant audiences. Those counter-narratives are unearthed and expanded by writers and painters, black and white, who deliberately set themselves to the task of resisting exclusionary definitions of art and audience. Against the "master narrative" of the traditional white South, which sought to suppress and co-opt dissenters, rebels, and visionaries, an alternatve strain of writers and painters of the twentieth-century South came to construct their readers as resistant and heterogeneous and their own artistic visions as premised on the death of regional tradition.
