The American South is the site of origins of one of strongest literary traditions in U.S. history: the slave narrative and the slave novel. If the Harlem renaissance is read as an extension of this powerfully oral, transcribed, and inscribed written inheritance, the Southern Literary Renaissance constitutes a story of rebirth from a place of denied origins. Just as Jean Toomer's Cane is (in terms of published work) the most intimate mother of Southern modernism, the Southern Literary Renaissance must be acknowledged as a progressive event that was provoked and evoked, sparked and, to a significant degree, spawned by the Harlem Renaissance. This course examines varieties of realism: political local color, regionalism, veritism, naturalism, social realism, and modernism as well as surrealism and magic realism. The authors considered include: Chesnutt, Chopin, Hurston, Wright, Crews, Toomer, Faulkner, Porter, O'Connor, McCullers, and Welty.