The present volume is based on lectures given at an international symposium held at the University of Vienna. Cultural and social historians and literary scholars from nine countries deal with a neglected topic, the representation of class in Southern culture, focusing in par­ticular on the marginalized group of ‘poor whites’. The analysis of early sociological descriptions of Southern society is followed by analyses of literary texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The texts analyzed mirror the pre­occupation of both reactionary and radical authors and journalists with the lower social classes. The critical investigations document the conservative tendencies in a society in which white men from the upper classes were privileged while tenant farmers and African-Americans functioned as the indispensable work force. Several essays also explore the overlapping of social and ethnic conflicts, which in the American South prevented solidarity across racial boundaries. They also examine the experiences of poor whites as reflected in their music, and study the hierarchies in Southern society. To conclude there are several essays in which the new self-confidence of white and black women writers from the lower social classes is illustrated. They exemplify the new voices which nowadays are an integral part of Southern literature, which thus eludes homogenization and demonstrates the pres­ence of multiple voices in a varied literary landscape.

Content: Waldemar Zacharasiewicz: Preface Waldemar Zacharasiewicz: Introduction: Class in Southern Culture Michael O’Brien: Class and the Old South Kurt Albert Mayer: Augustan Nostalgia and Patrician Disdain in A.B. Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes Giovanni Fabbi: “Democratic, fair, stalwart and progressive”: South Carolina newspaper The State and the urban middle-class in the World War I years Robert J. Haws: Sex, Class and Masculinity in Southern Culture Pia Masiero Marcolin: “White Trash”: the Exemplary Naming of a Class in W. Faulkner’s Wash Richard Gray: “These are the unknown people”: Erskine Caldwell and the Algebra of Need Dan Carter: Race, Class and Southern Violence in the 1950s Wayne Flynt: Class and Race, Text and Context in To Kill a Mockingbird Ineke Bockting: Class Distinctions and Their Transgression: Code-Switching, Code-Mixing and Style-Shifting in Domestic Fiction of the American South Jan Nordby Gretlund: Flannery O’Connor and Class: The System Asserts Itself Charles Reagan Wilson: Saturated Southerners: The South’s Poor Whites in Modern Southern Literature Martin Crawford: A Class Novel? Cold Mountain Fictions and Appalachian Realities Marcel Arbeit: “Send the Bloody Intellectuals to Gym”: Harry Crews’s Educated Super(wo)man and Victims of Both Sexes Constante González Groba: The Dangerous Intersections of Artistic Pretensions and Class Consciousness in Stories by Lee Smith Anneke Leenhouts: A Different Pedestal: The Southern Lady’s Poorer Sisters Come Into Their Own Youli Theodosiadou: In a Class by Themselves: “Other­moth­ers” in Shay Youngblood’s The Big Mama Stories