Overview

The Bad Poor examines the rise of Grit Lit, a movement in contemporary southern literature written by and about poor southern whites. Examining issues of genre, race, and culture, Mitch Ploskonka traces the emergence of this iconoclastic mode through its major authors to reveal a literary-cultural identity rooted in difference, marked by resistance to respectability and class performance, and shaped by reckoning with the legacies of whiteness and regional memory. For those long dismissed as ""white trash"" and denied an active voice in their own representation, Grit Lit confronts the parallel concerns of finding a way to describe themselves and the means to communicate it appropriately. Beginning with Harry Crews and progressing chronologically to the present—including discussions of key works by Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, and Tom Franklin, among others—Ploskonka examines how Grit Lit authors forge self-representations by experimenting with genres and engaging with identity politics. Through the ongoing search for a usable, unshameful identity, Grit Lit enacts a painful but heartening narrative of grappling with the realities of people and place by acknowledging difference. As stories about the gritty or rough South proliferate across media, The Bad Poor relates an important story of literary self-fashioning by analyzing a body of literature that speaks to larger cultural discourses regarding racial identity, social justice, disability, and class divisions.

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9780807185889

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Reviews

""Mitch Ploskonka's provocative meditation on poor whites and their shape-shifting roles in contemporary culture and politics offers deep insight and understanding for readers of the insurgent literary form known as Grit Lit. This is important work, and The Bad Poor does it with style."" - Matt Wray, author of Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness ""The Bad Poor provides a fresh exploration of Grit Lit through the intersectional lenses of race, feminism, queerness, and disability studies. In this important contribution to southern studies, Ploskonka examines the evolution of Grit Lit, asking a series of urgent and provocative questions about the genre and its evolving forms."" - Sarah Robertson, author of Gothic Appalachian Literature

Author Information

Mitch Ploskonka is assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute (ATI). His research focuses on southern literature, disability studies, and popular culture.

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