Ohio History Journal

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BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS

 

Segments of Southern Thought. By Edd Winfield Parks. (Athens,

The University of Georgia Press, 1938. 392p.)

This aptly titled volume was one of the first to be issued by

the University of Georgia Press, recently established to care for

the literary output of southern thinkers and writers on subjects of

regional interest and importance.

Admittedly informal, the articles which compose the book are

written from a point of view which the author calls the "distributist-

agrarian" one, and are, in effect, essays in the re-evaluation of

southern life and literature, both old and new. Written for specific

reasons and in general printed elsewhere before included in this

volume, these studies are essentially occasional pieces, though

the consistency of viewpoint which they exhibit and the orderly

sequence of their arrangement give them a certain unity.

The book is divided into three parts, only two of which are

pertinent to the theme of the book as a whole, since Eugene

O'Neill and George Borrow, of whom Parks writes in Part

Three, can in no sense be classed as southerners. Part One deals

with the general aspects of southern life, with special emphasis

on the factors contributing to the development of its literature,

while Part Two is made up of biographical sketches of six per-

sons identified in various ways with the southern scene: Frances

Wright, the social reformer who in the days prior to the War

between the States made an unsuccessful attempt to establish

at Nashoba, Tennessee, a colony to educate and emancipate negro

slaves; the beloved Tennessee schoolmaster Sawney Webb;

Walter Hines Page, who believed (and Parks thinks wrongly)

that southern progress would inevitably follow in the wake of

education and industrialization; and three writers--Sut Lov-

ingood, Richard Malcolm Johnston, and Mark Twain--each of

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