This is an inviting look at the influence of the yeoman's small farm on six modern southern writers. 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. Hovis explains that a wealthy planter elite was significantly less prominent in North Carolina than in neighboring regions, and as such the state's plain folk did not develop a class identity based as deeply in relation to a superior planter class. Instead the identification of the yeoman's small farm, rather than the plantation, as necessary to the ideal life has been 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: Lee Smith and Fred Chappell from the mountains, Doris Betts and Clyde Edgerton from the Piedmont, and Reynolds Price and Randall Kenan from the coastal plain. The work of these six writers is explored 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. Although these writers celebrate the egalitarianism at the heart of the yeoman ideal, they also expose the forms of racism, sexism, and classism that have also marked the state's history.
