Living Jim Crow

Explores how novelists of the mid-century US South invented small towns to aesthetically undermine racial segregation
Analysing the ubiquity of the small town in fiction of the mid-century US South, Living Jim Crow is the first extended scholarly study to explore how authors mobilised this setting as a tool for racial resistance. With innovative close readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Lillian Smith, Byron Herbert Reece, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and William Melvin Kelley, the book traces the relationship between activism and aesthetics during the long civil rights movement. Lennon reframes a narrative of southern literature during the period as one characterised by an aesthetics of protest, identifying a new mode of reading racial resistance and the US South.
Gavan Lennon is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Gavan Lennon is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Acknowledgements; Introduction: Uncovering a Poetics of Protest; 1. Creators of the Small Town: Anthropology, Racial Etiquette, and African American Fiction in the 1930s; 2. The White Town/Coloured Town Paradigm: Lillian Smith's Maxwell; 3. An Anatomy of Critique: Byron Herbert Reece's Tilden; 4. The Milan Cycle: Carson McCullers' Milan; 5. Breaking the Pencil: William Faulkner's Jefferson; 6. Knowing How to Curse: William Melvin Kelley's Sutton; Conclusion: (De)Generative Ground: The Field and the Segregated Town; Index.