Brits and grits: Courtesy, continuity, and identity in Shakespeare and Faulkner

This project investigates the cultural, historical, and literary relationships between the high literature of Shakespeare and Faulkner and the conduct literature of each author's respective Renaissance. The underlying premise of this discussion is that elite twentieth century Southerners deliberately appropriated both behavior codes and material and figurative signs of gentility from their counterparts in Renaissance England. In order to cement social identities threatened by the evolution of capitalistic growth and technological progress in the twentieth century, elite Southerners mythologized their past, their lineage, and their assertions of themselves as aristocratic based upon an idealized conception of a past and preferable agrarian Renaissance England.;By first examining gentility as a social construction in both British and Southern Renaissance cultures mediated through the deportment literature, the issue of gentility is then applied to the high literature of Shakespeare and Faulkner. The comparative analysis of the high literature informed by the conduct books reveals surprising intersections between two authors and cultures separated by more than 300 years of history and 2,000 miles of ocean. Cultural and ideological patterns emerge through the comparison of these literatures which underscore the South's fascination with an idealized Anglo-Saxon past which permeates the broad cultural manifestations and permutations of high literature and pop culture as well as pop literature and high culture. Shakespeare and his culture informs Faulkner and his South through an ongoing theoretical dialogue which collapses the distance between their divergent ideologies, histories, geographies, and cultures.