Reactionary Regionalism versus Critical Quarterlies (1925–1945)

Abstract

When Appalachian poets began publishing in the 1930s, they were largely able to do so because regionalism had become a national discourse with living roots in the ongoing debates between the Nashville Agrarians and Southern liberals about the South’s relationship to industry and culture. During the inward-looking 1930s, regionalism became a position from which social planners and literary artists resisted standardization while at the same time placing those resources at the behest of regional cultures. In American Regionalism (1938), for instance, Howard Odum and Harry Estill asked how the United States could best realize “an economy of abundance” by fostering “the pluralism of America” such that each group could “recognize their folk personality or culture” (144–150).¹