In a deft analysis of works by Doris Betts, Reynolds Price, Fred Chappell, Lee Smith, Clyde Edgerton, and Randall Kenan, Vale of Humility explores the lives of the plain folk, white and black, who populate the worlds of contemporary North Carolina fiction.
As George Hovis explains, a wealthy planter elite was significantly less prominent in North Carolina than in neighboring regions, and as a result the state's plain folk did not develop a class identity based as deeply in relation to a superior planter class. Instead of the plantation, the yeoman's small farm has been the essential context for the ideal life and thus a distinguishing feature of the state's literature. In this first full-length study of North Carolina's contemporary fiction, Hovis examines the work of six representative writers from the state's three geographic regions: Smith and Chappell from the mountains, Betts and Edgerton from the Piedmont, and Price and Kenan from the coastal plain. He explores their work within the broader Southern literary tradition with attention to how they have revised such modes as pastoral, family saga, and southwestern humor in order to portray their own regional experiences.
Just as writers of the Southern Renascence in the early twentieth century were characterized by a "backward glance" to a passing culture, today's North Carolina writers often critique their contemporary Sun Belt society through the lens of what they view as a fading yeoman past. Although these writers celebrate the egalitarianism at the heart of the yeoman ideal, they also expose the racism, sexism, and classism that have also marked the state's history.
