Now you have a tidal wave of blue-collar experiences described in novels from the South from writers who come from that experience. Those who attend next weekend s S.C. Book Festival, with its theme, Tell Me About the South, will hear from some of the new Southern voices. Diversity is ascendant. Southern writers now emerge with Asian backgrounds. White writers find black voices.
Black writers adopt whites into their literary structures.
Southern writers have discovered that it is no longer necessary to write about rural life to write a Southern fiction. Novelist Josephine Humphreys in Charleston, for example, takes her characters to a decidedly urban stage. Yet, as if to prove the point about the dangers of generalizing, consider Tony Earley who, in his recent novel Jim, the Boy, shows us that a rural setting does not have to be limiting in its exploration of contemporary truth. Surveying the future, The only limit is the imagination, Rubin said. And that seems likely to be the guiding measure for the next generation of practitioners of Southern literature, who have shown they will not permit their fiction to be relegated to collateral positions in a dynamic American literature.