Superfluous Southerners: Cultural conservatism and the South, 1920--1990

This dissertation is a study of American intellectual history and, in particular, of the possibilities and limitations of cultural conservatism in twentieth-century America. While the principal focus is on Southern intellectuals ranging from Allen Tate to M.E. Bradford, the study considers their dilemma in the broader contexts of American and Western thought. A central premise is that American and, more specifically, Southern intellectual history affords a singularly appropriate means of contemplating the fate of the humanistic intellectual in the modern world.;Expanding from Karl Mannheim's notion that the conservative intellectual is preoccupied with "imagining a past that is dissolving," this study of Southern intellectual and imaginative reconstruction joins conventional and unconventional contributors to Southern conservative discourse. From the perspectives of six Southern intellectuals spanning two generations, the study traces the development of three related, but diverse modes of Southern cultural conservatism which emerged during the twentieth century. Accordingly, the preliminary chapters examine the emergence of John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson and Allen Tate as conservative intellectuals following the first World War and their participation in the Agrarian movement during the 1930s. Agrarianism, which arose from a confrontation with the New Humanists and which reached its pinnacle with the publication of I'll Take My Stand, fragmented during the late thirties into three modes of cultural conservatism. Ultimately, Ransom sought refuge in literary criticism; Davidson in sectionalism; and Tate in an image of the religious wayfarer as a custodian of language. Subsequent chapters trace the expansion and renovation of these modes of cultural conservatism by succeeding generations of Southern intellectuals. Following the Second World War, Cleanth Brooks refined the tradition of literary criticism and Richard Weaver elaborated that of sectionalism. However, both Brooks and Weaver, in distinct ways, also countenanced Tate's notion that the integrity of language constituted the fundamental concern of the man of letters in the modern world. Though the rise of neoconservatism during the fifties transformed the American political landscape, the intellectual descendants of the New Humanist and Agrarian persuasions remained largely peripheral, indeed superfluous, to this purported conservative revival which ultimately had more in common with pragmatic liberalism than traditionalist conservatism. In illustration of this, the study concludes with a consideration of the normative conservative vision of Mel Bradford.