Discussing individuals as diverse as William Gilmore Simms, Mark Twain, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Sidney Lanier, and Ellen Glasgow, Wyatt-Brown identifies a close association between creativity and psychological distress. This connection helps to explain southern literary engrossment with defeat and violence - together with a disposition for the romantic, gothic, and grotesque styles - well before William Faulkner and the male Southern Renaissance. Wyatt-Brown also finds that the first authors to break away from the sentimental modes to explore new psychological terrain were women whose depression ironically furnished them with critical dispassion. A major reinterpretation of the South's fertile literary culture, Hearts of Darkness intensifies our regard for both southern writers and the fruits of pen and paper.
