Talking trash: Grotesque realism and the poor white in twentieth-century Southern fiction

The social circumstance of poverty permits "poor white trash" a wealth of contradictory literary conditions: deprived of material comforts, yet inextricable from its own materiality; ill-spoken, yet perversely eloquent in its agitation of official social language; trivial to the traditional Southern literary canon, yet finally indispensable to its endurance. In this study, I suggest that the versatility of that degenerate condition reveals the literary function of the "white trash" as wildly indeterminate and, as such, indispensable to the development of Southern literature and Southern identity at large.; From his first appearance in William Byrd of Westover's 1728 History of the Dividing Line to current incarnations (in the 2006 film Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, for example), "white trash" represents a wildly adaptable figure within the American cultural imagination. In particular, interpretations of poor whites in twentieth-century Southern literature simultaneously register at once humor, pathos, and fear---as demonstrated by the grotesque body in William Faulkner's The Hamlet , polyphony in Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee , and the carnivaleque in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina.; The aesthetics of Bakhtin's grotesque realism allow for the simultaneous celebration and rehabilitation of supposed degeneracy of the poor white: through both its image and language, "white trash" unapologetically celebrates the anarchic, grotesque elements of popular culture.