Reviewing the South
The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920–1941

An examination of the literary marketplace's central role in creating the Southern Literary Renaissance.

Sarah Gardner (Author)

9781316602379, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 July 2019

330 pages
23 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.5 kg

'Gardner begins this cultural-historical study of the southern literary renaissance - a rebirth in and new direction for literature from the southern US after WWI - with a review of the roles that book publishers and reviewers played in steering readers to worthwhile books. … A central, intriguing idea underlying Gardner's analysis is that the line between meeting a demand and creating that demand in the first place is sometimes hard to trace. The book looks at how southern renaissance writers including Julia Peterkin, Jean Toomer, Ellen Glasgow, Erskine Caldwell, and William Faulkner rejected sentimentality and nostalgia, offering instead a more realistic view of Jim Crow. Analysis of reviews, readers' replies, and advertisements demonstrates why these writers' works gained attention between the wars, how readers responded to them, and why Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind outsold them all. … Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.' C. A. Bily, Choice

The American South received increased attention from national commentators during the interwar era. Beginning in the 1920s, the proliferation of daily book columns and Sunday book supplements in newspapers reflected a growing audience of educated readers and its demand for books and book reviews. This period of intensified scrutiny coincided with a boom in the publishing industry, which, in turn, encouraged newspapers to pay greater attention to the world of books. Reviewing the South shows how northern critics were as much involved in the Southern Literary Renaissance as Southern authors and critics. Southern writing, Gardner argues, served as a litmus to gauge Southern exceptionalism. For critics and their readers, nothing less than the region's ability to contribute to the vibrancy and growth of the nation was at stake.

Introduction: from Renaissance to reformation
1. The world the reviewers made
2. The cultural economy of reading in the interwar years
3. The South meets Harlem
4. Confronting Jim Crow
5. Away down South in the land of problems
6. A class of burden bearers
7. The most audacious book ever written by Southerners
8. Fiction fights the Civil War
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: National liberation & independence, post-colonialism [HBTR], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: post-colonial literature [DSBH5], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]