Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature

Examining three autobiographies-Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin's The Making of a Southerner, Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream, and Willie Morris's North Toward Home -Hinrichsen reveals the way white Southerners lay claim to injury by rewriting racial cruelty as trauma shared by the white and black community. In the next chapter, Hinrichsen analyzes Bobbie Ann Mason'sIn Country and Clyde Edgerton's The Floatplane Notebooks, two novels that focus on the aftermath of the Vietnam War, arguing that the war caused the sense of shame endemic to the South to spread to the rest of the nation.