In this stimulating collection of essays, twenty scholars apply new theoretical approaches to the fiction and poetry of southern writers ranging from Poe to Dickey, from Faulkner to Hurston. Departing from earlier traditions of southern literary scholarship, this book seeks not to create a new orthodoxy but to suggest the diversity of critical tools that can now be used to explore the literature and culture of the South. Including essays based on deconstructionist, feminist, and Marxist theory, the book features contributions from such critics as Henry Louis Gates, Harold Bloom, Fred Chappell, and Joan DeJean. Yet, for all their variety, the essayists share the same central concern. "We have in common," writes Jefferson Humphries, "one thing that sets us apart from our elders in our conception of the South and our approach to southern literature: the basic assumption that the meaning and significance of literature is not in the immanence of the literary object, or in history, but in the complex ways in which the literary, the historical, and all the 'human sciences' that study both, are interrelated." Instead of simply taking "the South" for granted, the contributors to this volume see it as a text and an idea--as something whose ideological underpinnings, complexities, and contradictions must be subjected to close reading and questioning. Southern Literature and Literary Theory represents a major effort to redefine the relationship of southern writing and the South itself to the larger world.

Defining Southern Literature delineates several phases in the story of Southern literature. Debate over what makes Southern literature different - or even Southern - goes back many decades, and among the answers has been the debate itself, a uniquely pervasive regional self-consciousness over what makes Southern culture different. Certainly no other American region has been so distinctly "marked" as the South has. Attempts to delineate the special mission, nature, problems, and virtues of Southern writers can be traced back at least to the 1830s, when editors called - with only slight success - for a sectional literature and more supportive Southern readers.

I take...an outward route, arguing that the Agrarian project was and must be seen as a willed campaign on the part of one elite to establish and control 'the South' in a period of intense cultural maneuvering. The principal organizers of I'll Take My Stand knew full well there were other 'Souths' than the one they touted; they deliberately presented a fabricated South as the one and only real thing. In Inventing Southern Literature Michael Kreyling casts a penetrating ray upon the traditional canon of southern literature and questions the modes by which it was created. He finds that it was, indeed, an invention rather than a creation. In the 1930s the foundations were laid by the Fugitive-Agrarian group, a band of poet-critics that wished not only to design but also to control the southern cultural entity in a conservative political context. From their heyday to the present, Kreyling investigates the historical conditions under which literary and cultural critics have invented the South and how they have chosen its representations. Through his study of these choices, Kreyling argues that interested groups have shaped meanings that preserve a South as the South. As the Fugitive-Agrarians molded the region according to their definition in I'll Take My Stand, they professed to have developed a critical method that disavowed any cultural or political intent or content, a claim that Kreyling disproves. He shows that their torch was taken by Richard Weaver on the Right and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., on the Center-Left and that both critics tried to preserve the Fugitive-Agrarian credo despite the severe stresses imposed during the era of desegregation. As the southern literary paradigm has been attacked and defended, certain issues have remained in the forefront. Kreyling takes on three: reconciling the imperatives of race with the traditional definitions of the South; testing the ways white women writers of the South have negotiated space within or outside the paradigm; and analyzing the critics' use and abuse of William Faulkner (the major figure of southern literature) as they have relied on his achievement to anchor the total project called Southern Literature. Michael Kreyling, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of several books, including "Eudora Welty's Achievement of Order" and "Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell."

In this innovative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to articulate the vexed connections between society and environment, particularly under segregation and its legacies.<

Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Selected as an Outstanding Reference Source by the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association There are many anthologies of southern literature, but this is the first companion. Neither a survey of masterpieces nor a biographical sourcebook, The Companion to Southern Literature treats every conceivable topic found in southern writing from the pre-Columbian era to the present, referencing specific works of all periods and genres. Top scholars in their fields offer original definitions and examples of the concepts they know best, identifying the themes, burning issues, historical personalities, beloved icons, and common or uncommon stereotypes that have shaped the most significant regional literature in memory. Read the copious offerings straight through in alphabetical order (Ancestor Worship, Blue-Collar Literature, Caves) or skip randomly at whim (Guilt, The Grotesque, William Jefferson Clinton). Whatever approach you take, The Companion’s authority, scope, and variety in tone and interpretation will prove a boon and a delight. Explored here are literary embodiments of the Old South, New South, Solid South, Savage South, Lazy South, and “Sahara of the Bozart.” As up-to-date as grit lit, K Mart fiction, and postmodernism, and as old-fashioned as Puritanism, mules, and the tall tale, these five hundred entries span a reach from Lady to Lesbian Literature. The volume includes an overview of every southern state’s belletristic heritage while making it clear that the southern mind extends beyond geographical boundaries to form an essential component of the American psyche. The South’s lavishly rich literature provides the best means of understanding the region’s deepest nature, and The Companion to Southern Literature will be an invaluable tool for those who take on that exciting challenge. Description of Contents 500 lively, succinct articles on topics ranging from Abolition to Yoknapatawpha 250 contributors, including scholars, writers, and poets 2 tables of contents — alphabetical and subject — and a complete index A separate bibliography for most entries

"The concept of masculinity has had a profound influence on modern gay-written and gay-themed American Southern literature. Much of the fiction and drama of three important contemporary writers - Tennessee Williams, Charles Nelson, and Reynolds Price - has been shaped by the cultural dynamics of the Southern tradition of codified definitions and parameters of masculinity. This regional approach to literature also serves as critically protective, maintaining its focus in an effort to avoid essentializing experience and identity. Gay Men in Modern Southern Literature will be a valuable asset in the study of gender construction, literary theory, and modern American Southern writing."--Publisher's website.

At the heart of the southern riddle you will find a union of opposites, a condition of instability, a paradox. Calm grace and raw hatred. Polished manners and violence. An intense individualism and intense group pressures toward conformity. A reverence to the point of idolatry of self-determining action and a caste and class structure presupposing an aristocratic hierarchy. A passion for political action and a willingness to surrender to the enslavement of demagogues. A love of the nation intense enough to make the South's fighting men notorious in our wars and the advocacy of interposition and of the public defiance of national law. A region breeding both Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun. If these contradictions are to be brought in focus, if these ambiguities are to be resolved, it must be through the 'reconciliation of opposites.' And the reconciliation of opposites, as Coleridge has told us, is the function of the poet. So begins the first of these seventeen penetrating essays drawn from long and fruitful reflection of southern life and art by C. Hugh Holman. Professor Holman maintains that there is a congeries of characteristics identifiably present in much southern writing, and he astutely defines them in this collection. William Gilmore Simms, Ellen Glasgow, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor are treated at length. Among the other authors considered in terms of their roles in the making of the southern mind are James Branch Cabell, T.S. Stribling, Erskine Caldwell, and Robert Penn Warren. The essays strike a fine balance between general overview and specific analysis, and they are so arranged as to make a unified study which forms a significant chapter in the intellectual history of the South. Professor Holman asserts that "out of the cauldron of the South's experience, the southern writer has fashioned tragic grandeur and given it as a gift to his fellow Americans. It is possible that no other southern accomplishment will equal it in enduring importance. As urbanization and industrialism conspire to write an 'Epitaph for Dixie,' its greatest contribution to mankind may well be the lesson of its history and the drama of its suffering." In these superb essays the author makes a convincing argument for that position.