| Abstract |
The present paper is an attempt to describe and discuss several major themes in W. J. Cash's classical study about Southern culture and history, The Mind of the South (1941) . In this paper I hope to ...lay a groundwork for my future plans to review what is called the Southern Renaissance, an intellectual movement in the South which, ranging from sociology and history to literature and journalism, tried to redefine the South by destroying cultural myths of its legendary past. Cash overthrows the plantation myth of the Old South, including the Cavalier legend, by putting forward the planter-frontiersman theory. What Cash calls the proto-Dorian convention shows the way white Southerners become blind to their real interests and suppress class consciousness whenever racial issues come up. This pattern of working in the Southern mind, Cash insists, serves to determine the course of Southern history in its crises, such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, the ages of Populism and Progress, and the period of depression in the 1930s. In addition to this convention based on the ideology of white supremacy, Cash reveals that white Southerners' inveterate individualism as well as their inclinations for unreality, which are reinforced by romanticism and hedonism, is responsible for the tragic history of the South. In his insightful analyses, Cash makes it clear that the mind of the South is vulnerable to illusions, thus incurring the political rule of myths and legends as an ideological construction.show more
|
Export Mendeley
slc005p011