This dissertation analyzes the relationship between social history and the
geographic spread of modernism. Many critics have noted the irony that writers from the
South—the nation’s poorest and most illiterate region in the first half of the twentieth
century—cultivated an unexpected literary flowering between World War I and World
War II. I argue that World War I acted as a pivotal catalytic event, ending the post-
Reconstruction South’s self-imposed intellectual isolation and allowing for the diffusion
of modern American and European social, cultural, and economic practices into the
region, thus shifting the region’s economic base from agriculture to industry and moving
the region’s intellectual superstructure from regionalism to modernism.
In five chapters I examine the representation of World War I in modernist texts by
southern and non-southern writers. The first two chapters analyze changes in the
demographic and economic foundation of southern culture, connecting the war as a
vehicle for interregional cultural exchange to William Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay and short
stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald and tracing the emergence of mechanization and
industrialization in Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground and Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust.
The three subsequent chapters examine the effects of infrastructural change on major
elements of southern society, exploring the effects of war-time patriotism on sectional
ideology in William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee and Donald Davidson’s
The Tall Men, analyzing the war’s impact on the struggle for civil rights in Walter
White’s The Fire in the Flint and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, and discussing the
representation of southern womanhood in post-World War I southern women’s fiction.
This dissertation analyzes the relationship between social history and the
geographic spread of modernism. Many critics have noted the irony that writers from the
South—the nation’s poorest and most illiterate region in the first half of the twentieth
century—cultivated an unexpected literary flowering between World War I and World
War II. I argue that World War I acted as a pivotal catalytic event, ending the post-
Reconstruction South’s self-imposed intellectual isolation and allowing for the diffusion
of modern American and European social, cultural, and economic practices into the
region, thus shifting the region’s economic base from agriculture to industry and moving
the region’s intellectual superstructure from regionalism to modernism.
In five chapters I examine the representation of World War I in modernist texts by
southern and non-southern writers. The first two chapters analyze changes in the
demographic and economic foundation of southern culture, connecting the war as a
vehicle for interregional cultural exchange to William Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay and short
stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald and tracing the emergence of mechanization and
industrialization in Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground and Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust.
The three subsequent chapters examine the effects of infrastructural change on major
elements of southern society, exploring the effects of war-time patriotism on sectional
ideology in William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee and Donald Davidson’s
The Tall Men, analyzing the war’s impact on the struggle for civil rights in Walter
White’s The Fire in the Flint and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, and discussing the
representation of southern womanhood in post-World War I southern women’s fiction.
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