The legacy of Job in contemporary southern literature (Alice Walker, Larry Brown, Gail Godwin)

The Book of Job operates as a trope that illustrates questions of cosmic justice, personal blamelessness, and responsibility: aspects of identity integral to southern literature. Much of southern literature involves individuals trying to make sense of their relationship to southern history-via-mythmaking, a legacy of subjugation, and personal suffering as possible retribution: the Joban figure. That individual finds himself forsaken—both spiritually and cosmically—without “just cause,” creating the Joban dilemma. When he traverses an existential journey in which he is confounded by his own innocence, both as part of a blameless community and as a constructed scapegoat within his community, he traverses the tripartite Joban journey of fear, rage, and compassion. When he recognizes his minuteness before God and his identity as one sufferer within a community, he has realized the Joban theodicy. The Joban trope thus provides an identifying background for southern texts not only in terms of the Joban figure, journey, dilemma, and theodicy, but also in the means by which characters realize identity.; Publishing after 1970 in the post-Civil Rights era South, writing from the perspective of the disenfranchised, and focusing on the suffering and alienation of the southern subject, Alice Walker, Larry Brown, and Gail Godwin show that postsouthern writing can connect with the traditional southern issues of family, place, history, and race while reenvisioning southern culture. The Joban trope, as a technical and thematic undercurrent, both links them to the tradition of southern literature and simultaneously allows them to depict a new image of the South. Walker's presentation of the Civil Rights Movement in her early works, such as The Third Life of Grange Copeland , dramatizes how racism ripples divisively in other aspects of her characters' lives, leading to domestic violence, poverty, and a warped sense of self-worth. Brown confronts the working-class man's inner battle between doing good and doing evil as he navigates an increasingly alienated and commercialized world; in Dirty Work, Brown also addresses the spectre of war for southern men. For Gail Godwin, family and church communities provide a backdrop for women trying to make sense of the world. Her increasingly religious novels, like Father Melancholy's Daughter, highlight the cultural personae of the southern woman, portraying how questioning traditional spirituality acts as a means of individuation and consequent freedom from epistemological anguish.