Historian say Southern Literature began with the founding of Jamestown, but it didn't gain recognition until the late pre-civil wars. Southern literature carried such theme's as gothicism, romanticism, human relations, and the ever so popular incest. The authors that wrote these theme's into southern history included such greats as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Percy Walker. Southern writers were wide spread in what they wrote about. While some sought to romanticize life in the south by writing about wealthy plantation owners and the beautiful southern belle's. Others set out to describe the deplorable conditions of life in the south, concerned with the paradoxes and dilemmas of day to day life in the south. The southern writer's who began preaching about the horrible conditions of life in the south, began to view man as an evil creature with evil as an active force in his life. For example look at Poe and how he dramatized in his short stories, evoking through a medley of almost surrealistic images in his poetry, the sense of evil and intolerable anxiety at the core of human life. Perhaps another source of this dismal view came from the fundamentally "Calvinistic" religious beliefs that many southerner's held, this being basically a very grim view on life at the time. This grim view that many southern writer's wrote with usually represented a literary picture of tragic strength rather than pathetic weakness. Unfortunately this reality viewed by the south was not the reality shared by the rest of America. But out of this dark and evil world of thought, torn with bloody violence, slowly came an idea of human dignity and responsibility. The civil war had a great deal of influence on this negative view of southern life that so many writer's took, having succeeded from the Union only to loss, their self esteem was not at an all time high. Slowly over time, their self esteem was picked up and the literature began to once again take on a romanticized view, as is evident with the famous novel and movie Gone With The Wind. The more modern now a day attempts of literature at romanticizing life in the south have been turned into movies such as Driving Miss Daisy, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Forest Gump....... "and that's all I have to say about that". Spunk and Abortion