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

Harilaos Stecopoulos

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781108491679
• eBook ISBN: 9781108604628
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reconstructing Literary History
• Chapter 1 Fictions of the Native South
• Chapter 2 John Smith and the English Origins of Southern Exceptionalism
• Chapter 3 Plantation and Enlightenment
• Chapter 4 Geoconfederacy: Bartram’s Archipelagic Southern Political Ecology
• Chapter 5 In the Shadow of His Office: Architectures of Affect in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia
• Chapter 6 Shadows of Haiti: Racing Gender, Violence, and Sentiment in Victor Séjour, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Charles Chesnutt
• Chapter 7 “Midnight Bakings” Amid Starvation: Food and Aesthetics in the Slave Narrative
• Chapter 8 A Calculated Fiction: Antebellum Plantation Romances
• Chapter 9 Maroons and Marronage in Antebellum African American Literature
• Chapter 10 Everyday Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 11 Fables of the Bloody Shirt: Reconstruction and the Problem of National Violence
• Chapter 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
• Chapter 13 Moonlight and Magnolias No More: The New Plantation Tradition and Its Respondents
• Chapter 14 Women Writers and the Southern Renaissance; or, the Work of Gender in Literary Periodization
• Chapter 15 Southern Geographies and New Negro Modernism
• Chapter 16 “A fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA”: Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, Bontemps, and the Depression South
• Chapter 17 Provincialism as a Positive Good: Agrarianism and Its Afterlives
• Chapter 18 Faulkner’s Untimely Fiction
• Chapter 19 Reconsidering Du Bois’s “Central Text”: W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Wright, and the Problem of the “Black Worker”
• Chapter 20 Cultural Activism and Theater of the Civil Rights Movement
• Chapter 21 Till the Hurt Becomes Music: Gnosticism and Improvisation in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa
• Chapter 22 Undead Sound: The Undying Work of Fathers in Natasha Trethewey, Adam Vines, and Cormac McCarthy
• Chapter 23 There Is No South: The Weird Plantationocene of H. P. Lovecraft and Jeff VanderMeer
• Chapter 24 Hurricane Alley: Literature of the Coastal South in a Time of Climate Change
• Select Bibliography
• Index