ABSTRACT
The region's writing is rich, and it provides vital ways of understanding the South and its many contradictions. This chapter considers the characteristics of southern literature—in fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction—along with a survey of its major works. Before delving into the details of this literary history, it is useful to provide comments about some of the features that define southern literature. One of these is a tendency to employ certain character, narrative, and setting types. The tendency that has marked much of southern literature has been that of writing with a strong sense of the past and the ways it haunts the present. The urgent matters of the Civil Rights moment entered into the literature in profound ways that deeply shaped the southern literary landscape of the contemporary period across the race, class, and gender spectrum.
