90 American Literature
Stand, the scripture of the agrarian renascence, were each and all public spokesmen (albeit reluctantly) and continued their polemical role, with variations and exceptions, for the duration of their careers. Clemens, in the HSL version, further qualifies as a southern writer because he is “squarely within the tradition of Southwestern humor” (p. 234) and wrote a book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, praised by Allen Tate. The book is set in southern venues and utilizes a pastoral vocabulary of images. It and its author thereby immediately qualify as southern. To be sure, Colonel Sherburn damns the “savage ideal” of southern honor as nothing more than savage cowardice, but Rubin quickly asserts, “it is the power and beauty of the raft voyage itself” (p. 238) that we remember. We remember that part of the book and no others if we have indentured critical attention and practice to the service of southern mimesis. Criticism, so restrained, does not mention the lambasting sections of Life on the Mississippi, or the brutally satirical ending of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In short, the service of the orthodox definition and consensus is clearly a selective process of self-sustaining order, an exercise dedicated to keeping southern literature “a thing apart.”
III
HSL exists to funnel all literary definition and valorization through “The Southern Renascence, 1920-1950,” Part Three of the volume. In this era the definitions were forged, the tablets of inclusion and exclusion etched. Soldiers in the Agrarian cause wrestled the vocabulary of criticism away from the like of Trent and Henneman. Ransom, for instance, fastened “Puritanism” and “industrialism,” “American” and “modern” into synonymous relationships that rewrote American history and helped to found a republic of letters in the south. Separatists rose again to take control of southern literature. The critical ideology of most of HSL was born here.
The “industrialism” to “Puritanism” connection is made in the essay “Poets Without Laurels,” collected in The World’s Body (New York: Scribners, 1938), pp. 55-75. The “American” to “modern” connection occurs in “Introduction: Statement of Principles,” I’ll Take My Stand (1930; rpt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1977), pp. xxvii-xlviii.