Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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In fact, the autobiographical impulse that both black and women writers in the South share is characterized by their “double-voiced discourse” and their joint struggle to make their personal stories and voices heard in what had previously been a white male-dominated literary genre. ssss1 This struggle also found correspondence in the demands of feminists and minorities with their emphasis on equity and social change. Few southern male white writers felt the impulse to write autobiographies, with the exception of Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, John Gould Fletcher, and William Alexander Percy, for example. It wasn’t until the late 1960s—with Willie Morris’s North Toward Home (1967)—and the 1970s that several male white authors started to write memoirs and deal with issues related to family, race, poverty and guilt in them—for example, Andrew Lytle’s A Wake for the Living: A Family Chronicle (1973), Will Campbell’s Brother to a Dragonfly (1977), and Harry Crews’s A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978), and later Melton McLaurin’s Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South (1987). In recent years, more male white writers have joined the body of southern life-writing, though the genre still shows an overwhelming majority of autobiographies and different kinds of memoirs written by southern African Americans and women writers.