A History of the Literature of the U.S. South: Volume 1

Drawing on diverse theories and methods, this collective volume emphasizes the multi-ethnic and transnational aspects of southern literature over a four hundred-year period.

Harilaos Stecopoulos (Edited by)

9781108491679, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 May 2021

466 pages
23.5 x 16.2 x 3.2 cm, 0.78 kg

'Recommended.' M. L. Robertson, Choice Connect

A History of the Literature of the U.S. South provides scholars with a dynamic and heterogeneous examination of southern writing from John Smith to Natasha Trethewey. Eschewing a master narrative limited to predictable authors and titles, the anthology adopts a variegated approach that emphasizes the cultural and political tensions crucial to the making of this regional literature. Certain chapters focus on major white writers (e.g., Thomas Jefferson, William Faulkner, the Agrarians, Cormac McCarthy), but a substantial portion of the work foregrounds the achievements of African American writers like Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sarah Wright to address the multiracial and transnational dimensions of this literary formation. Theoretically informed and historically aware, the volume's contributors collectively demonstrate how southern literature constitutes an aesthetic, cultural and political field that richly repays examination from a variety of critical perspectives.

Introduction. Reconstructing literary history Harilaos Stecopoulos
1. Fictions of the native south Melanie Benson Taylor
2. John Smith and the English origins of southern exceptionalism Rob McLoone
3. Plantation and enlightenment Jennifer Greeson
4. Geoconfederacy
or, Bartram's Southern archipelago Monique Allewaert
5. In the shadow of his office: architectures of affect in Jefferson's notes on the State of Virginia Laura Rigal
6. Shadows of Haiti: racing gender, violence and sentiment in Victor Séjour, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Charles Chesnutt Susan Castillo Street
7. 'Midnight bakings' amid starvation: food and aesthetics in the slave narrative Stephanie Tsank
8. A calculated fiction: antebellum plantation romances Katharine Burnett
9. Maroons and marronage in antebellum African American literature Sean Gerrity
10. Everyday literary culture in the nineteenth century Christopher Hager and Beth Barton Schweiger
11.'Fables of the Bloody Shirt': reconstruction and the problem of national violence Scott Romine
12. A heritage unique in the ages: the politics of black southern womanhood in Anna Julia Cooper's a voice from the south by a black woman from the south Joanna Davis-McElligatt
13. Moonlight and magnolias no more: the new plantation tradition and its respondents Justin Mellette
14. Women writers and the southern renaissance
or, the work of gender in literary periodization Jay Watson
15. Southern geographies and new Negro modernism Thadious Davis
16. 'A fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA': Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, Bontemps and the depression south Martyn Bone
17. Provincialism as a positive good: agrarianism and its afterlives Jon Smith
18. Faulkner's untimely fictions John Matthews
19. Reconsidering Du Bois's 'Central Text': W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Wright, and the problem of the 'Black Worker' Konstantina Karageorgos
20. Cultural activism and theater of the Civil Rights Movement Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder
21. Till the hurt becomes music: gnosticism and improvisation in the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa Herman Beavers
22. Undead sound
or, why southern poetry is not dead: the undying work of fathers in Natasha Trethewey, Adam Vines, and Cormac McCarthy Daniel Turner
23. There is no south: the weird Plantationocene of Jeff VanderMeer's southern reach trilogy Amy Clukey
24. Hurricane Alley: literature of the coastal south in a time of climate change Valerie Loichot.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: general [DSB]