To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel - Hardcover

Jeff Abernathy

9780820324869: To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820324868 ISBN 13: 9780820324869

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2003

This study of the construction of race in American culture takes its title from a central story thread in Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". Huck, who resolves to "go to hell" rather than turn over the runaway slave Jim, in time betrays his companion. Jeff Abernathy assesses cross-racial pairings in American literature following "Huckleberry Finn" to show that this pattern of engagement and betrayal appears repeatedly in American fiction - notably southern fiction - just as it appears throughout American history and culture. He contends that such stories of companionship and rejection express opposing tenets of American culture: a persistent vision of democracy and the racial hierarchy that undermines it. Abernathy traces this pattern through works by William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Kaye Gibbons, Sara Flanigan, Elizabeth Spencer, Padgett Powell, Ellen Douglas, and Glasgow Phillips. He then demonstrates how African American writers pointedly contest the pattern. The works of Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright, for example, "portray autonomous black characters and white characters who must earn their own salvation, or gain it not at all".

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Review:

"Critics have long argued that Twain started something big with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Thanks to this most impressive study we know much more about just what he started. In developing a compelling white character who was almost, but not quite, coaxed out of whiteness by an African American mentor and friend, Twain set a pattern for ambivalent white southern literary liberalism on race and for African American efforts to push beyond the limits of such liberalism."

About the Author:

Jeff Abernathy is Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of the College, and Professor of English at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

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