The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South

Edited by Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd

Oxford Handbooks

Includes 27 original essays by leading scholars in the field—bringing together contemporary views of the literature of the U.S. South and employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching southern literature
Examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics new to the field
Challenges earlier views of antebellum southern literature and questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of southern expression

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South

Edited by Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd

Description

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South—global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South—that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South

Edited by Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd

Oxford Handbooks

Contributors
Introduction
PART I: CONTACT TO THE CIVIL WAR
1. Literary and Textual Histories of the Native South. Eric Gary Anderson
2. Before Hypodescent: Whitening Equations in South America and the American South. Ruth Hill
3. The Dying Confession of Joseph Hare (1818): Transatlantic Highwaymen and Southern Outlaws in the Antebellum South. Thomas Ruys Smith
4. Jackson's Villes, Squares, & Frontiers of Democracy. Keith Cartwright
5. Locality and the Serial South. Lloyd Pratt
6. The Long Shadow of Torture in the American South. W. Fitzhugh Brundage
7. Masculine Sentiment, Racial Fetishism, and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum Southern Literature. Michael P. Bibler
PART II: THE CIVIL WAR AND BEYOND
8. Southern Affects: Field and Feeling in a Skeptical Age. Scott Romine
9. Not So Still Waters: Travelers to Florida and the Tropical Sublime. John W. Lowe
10. Indian Knives and Color Lines: Mark Twain from Hannibal to the Jim Crow Raj. Harilaos Stecopoulos
11. Narrative and Counternarrative in The Leopard's Spots and The Marrow of Tradition. Anthony Wilson
12. The Bright Side: African American Women and the Affective Archive of Southern Racial Uplift. Stephen Knadler
PART III: SOUTHERN MODERNISMS
13. " Proffered for your perusal in ring by concentric ring": The South and the World in William Faulkner's Fiction. Owen Robinson
14. Richard Weaver, Lillian Smith, the South, and the World. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.
15. Arts of Abjection in James Agee, Walker Evans, and Luis Bunuel. Leigh Anne Duck
16. Tennessee Williams and the Burden of Southern Sexuality Studies. Gary Richards
17. Reimagining the South of Richard Wright: The Anti-Protest Writing of Albert Murray, Raymond Andrews, and Ernest Gaines. James W..Coleman
18. Letter-Writing, Authorship, and Southern Women Modernists. Will Brantley
PART IV: AFTER SOUTHERN MODERNISMS: WRITING IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND CONTEMPORARY SOUTH
19. Nature and Spirituality in Contemporary Appalachian Poetry. John Lang
20. Southern Religion's Sexual Charge and the National Imagination. Katherine Henninger
21. Their Confederate Kinfolk: African Americans' Interracial Family Histories. Suzanne W. Jones
22. Mourning, Mockery, and the Post-South: Lars von Trier's Manderlay and Geraldine Brooks's March.. Michael Kreyling
23. Made Things: Structuring Modernity in Southern Poetry. Daniel Cross Turner
24. Four Contemporary Latina/o Writers Ghost the U.S. South. Maria DeGuzman
25. You Don't Have to Be Born There: Immigration and Contemporary Fiction of the U. S.. South. Martyn Bone
26. Asian Americans, Racial Latency, Southern Traces. Leslie Bow
27. The Woundedness of Southern Literature, Looking Away. Minrose Gwin

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South

Edited by Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd

Oxford Handbooks

Author Information

Edited by Fred Hobson, Lineberger Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Barbara Ladd, Professor of English, Emory College

Fred Hobson is Professor of English and Lineberger Professor of the Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of, among other works, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (LSU, l983), Mencken: A Life (Random House, 1994), But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (LSU, 1999), and The Silencing of Emily Mullen and Other Essays (LSU, 2005). He edits the Southern Literary Studies series at Louisiana State University Press and is co-editor, with Minrose Gwin, of the Southern Literary Journal. Barbara Ladd is Professor of English at Emory University. She is the author of Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner (LSU 1996) and Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty (LSU 2007).

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South

Edited by Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd

Oxford Handbooks

Reviews and Awards

"Including excellent bibliographies, this handbook demonstrates the achievement and the promise of the new Southern studies." - M. L. Robertson, CHOICE