The Context of William Styrons's The Confessions of Nat Turner

Abstract

A controlling assumption among critics of Southern literature today seems to be that the Southern Renaissance is over. Walter Sullivan, for example, views the extinction of literary florence in the South as an inevitable outcome. The myth of the past which sustained the renaissance in the last few decades, he believes, was not substantial enough to resist the surge "of social programs on the one hand, the attack of science and materialism on the other hand." Lewis P. Simpson does not declare the close of the Southern Renaissance. He views, however, the Southern literature to have gone through two major stages since 1920s. In the first stage which covers from 1920s to about 1950, Southern writing records "an attempted reconstruction of the meaning of the past by the literary mind." The second stage, he continues, is a period in which Southern writing tends to record "the breakdown of the endeavor in reconstructi on," and to suggest "that the only meaningful covenant for the latter-day writer is one with the self on terms generally defined as existential." William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner is one of the most germane novels in the controversy about the continuity of the Southern Renaissance. A predominant opinion about the novel is that Styron took quite a different line from his preceding generation.