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COPYRIGHT 2002 West Chester University
Guinn, Matthew. 2000. After Southern Modernism: Fiction of the Contemporary South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. $45.00 hc. $18.00 Sc. xxviii + 202 pp.
Nearly a decade after Fred Hobson took the first tentative steps toward defining the postmodern strains in contemporary southern fiction, Matthew Guinn presents this study, his first book, to reinforce a few of Hobson's points and to refute many others. Through careful and cogent readings of selected texts by nine fictionists-- including works by Richard Ford, Barry Hannah, and Bobbie Ann Mason also examined in Hobson's The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World (1991)--Guinn convincingly, if at times a little myopically, argues for the radical discontinuity between this emerging body of literature and that produced during the vaunted Renaissance.
Even at this late stage of literary history, Southernists have been slow to view postmodernism as a viable current within southern letters, and perhaps in recognition of this fact, Guinn's first chapters...
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