Description
Book SynopsisA 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.
Trade Review'Recommended.' M. L. Robertson, Choice Connect
Table of ContentsIntroduction. 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.
