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Book Review
Canada and the United States
Mark G. Malvasi. The Unregenerate South: The Agrarian Thought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson. (Southern Literary Studies.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1997. Pp. xx, 261. $35.00.
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Mark G. Malvasi has performed a useful service for those of us familiar with the Nashville Agrarians primarily for their brief flirtation with politics. In this book, Malvasi efficiently summarizes the early and late social thought of his three central subjects. Presented in sharp juxtaposition, these three intellectual journeys chronicle the frustrations of conservative southern humanism in the mid-twentieth century. Malvasi's protestations to the contrary, however, the whole remains a good deal less than the sum of the parts. |
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In principle, the Agrarians were rooted deep in the rural folk culture of the South. In practice, their short-lived movement grew out of the seminar halls of urbane academia. The antimaterialist ethic of the poets John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate owed more to the refined aesthetic of the Vanderbilt English department than to any organically acquired ethos of self-sufficient community. We should not be surprised (or for that matter too critical) that such men, despite their extravagant critique of unbridled individualism, would set out on their own journeys of intellectual self- discovery. |
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