Overview

This book focuses on the rise of poor white writers from working-class families in rural areas, mountainous regions, and urban slums around the 1980s, examining how their literary works rearticulated Southern society from a bottom-up perspective. Building on a diachronic analysis, the book further explores the synchronic and multifaceted dialogues between poor whites and various social forces. On the one hand, it investigates how poor white writing offers a critical engagement with institutional shortcomings, exposing issues such as widening wealth gaps and social injustice caused by uneven structural reproduction, and highlighting the shared structural marginalization of poor whites with African Americans, women, rural communities, and the natural environment. These marginalized forces are cast as the Other, and their rights are consistently undermined. On the other hand, the book examines egalitarian dialogues and communal imaginaries among marginalized forces in poor white writing, elucidating how, in a multicultural context, authoritative discourses are challenged and dialogue replaces confrontation, thereby demonstrating the significance of poor white literary discourse in reshaping class, race, gender, urban-rural, and ecological configurations and in reconstituting social power relations.

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