Minor literature comes of age: Transatlantic rites of passage in the Irish Revival and the Southern Renaissance

The impulses behind the Southern Literary Renaissance echoed the impetus behind the Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century, when Ireland sought to demonstrate its cultural equality with any European nation and disentangle itself from English-imposed stereotypes. Seeking to prove that the South was indeed the cultural equal of greater America, despite the harsh realities of political defeat, economic scarcity, and racial strife, Southern writers embarked on a career to re-imagine the American South and to re-invent literary criticism.; Tracing the transatlantic influence of the Irish Revival upon the Southern Renaissance, I explore how the latter looked to the former for guidance, artistic innovation, and models for self-invention and regional renovation. Offering a reassessment of regional or "minor literature," I use the term to refer not only to minority or regional authors who work within a major language to subvert it, but also to errant female juveniles within the texts whose nonconformist development threatens to disrupt the dominant patriarchal culture of a region or nation. With minor literature as the overall container for subsidiary genres such as popular fiction and short stories---often considered an author's juvenilia---I investigate how and why both movements charted the progress of their cultural revivals through representations of the maturation experienced by female adolescents. The trope of rebirth---or palingenesis---proves pivotal for the Irish and Southern Renaissances, as the revivalists often figured cultural, national, or regional regeneration through the symbolic rebirth and metamorphosis of female protagonists such as Cathleen ni Houlihan, Scarlett O'Hara, and Virgie Rainey. Using such themes to anchor the project, I analyze how the volatile palingenesis and maturation of female adolescents in revivalist texts often reflects larger growth pangs and patterns, including the evolution of the literary revival itself and the development of a regional minority group that must work within a dominant culture, language, and nation while seeking methods of subversion. Drawing upon New Historical, New Critical, and postcolonial approaches, I examine the works of Lady Gregory, Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, and Elizabeth Bowen, four writers wrongly ascribed a minor role in their region's cultural revivals.