Living Jim Crow: The Segregated Town in Mid-Century Southern Fiction

Explores how novelists of the mid-century US South invented small towns to aesthetically undermine racial segregation

Investigates the role of writing in the civil right movement
Explores neglected writers
Uncovers new readings of canonical texts
Models a new form of critical reading based on close textual analysis
Interrogates the relationship between literary production and social protest

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 as one characterised by an aesthetics of protest, identifying a new mode of reading racial resistance and the US South.