THE SOUTHERN TRADITION: FIVE STUDIES IN MEMORY (PERCY, WELTY, AGEE, FAULKNER, WOLFE)

In opposition to comments by Lewis Simpson and Walker Percy that memory plays a lesser role in the creative consciousness of modern Southern writers, this dissertation focuses on five Southern writers exploring the importance of memory to themselves and to the Southern community as they describe its power to control the present and future.;Thomas Wolfe and James Agee in Look Homeward, Angel and A Death in the Family find a personal peace in autobiographical memories and a key to their creative energies that seem otherwise unavailable to persons fragmented by time's passage and death's trauma.;In The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming, Walker Percy combines these other authors' approaches to problems with memory. By grafting autobiographical memories into his fictional characters' memories, Percy describes how Will Barrett, and perhaps himself, have learned to cope with the past's tremendous influence on their lives. Only after using memory in each novel to return to the past is Will Barrett, and I would suggest Walker Percy, able to solve how to regain sovereignty over their lives and live successfully in the present.;Based on selections from these five novelists' works, this dissertation suggests that coping with memories of the past will continue to play an important role in the imagination of present and future Southern writers and in the characters they create.;William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury depicts the power of characters' memories setting limits on the future. Suicide becomes Quentin Compson's only escape from haunting memories because he will not alter his view of the world or of himself in order to accommodate the fact of Caddy's promiscuity. Laurel McKelva Hand in Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter faces a similar predicament as she recalls memories of her life and her parents'. This confrontation allows her to thaw memories she has frozen in her mind and to accept the sad moments they hide. Laurel finally chooses living in the present while recognizing that memories of the past can still affect her, a solution for coping with the past that Eudora Welty has discussed in "A Curtain of Green," "First Love," "A Sketching Trip," and "Kin."...