ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South provides a collection of vibrant and multidisciplinary essays by scholars from a wide range of backgrounds working in the field of U.S. southern literary studies. With topics ranging from American studies, African American studies, transatlantic or global studies, multiethnic studies, immigration studies, and gender studies, this volume presents a multi-faceted conversation around a wide variety of subjects in U.S. southern literary studies. The Companion will offer a comprehensive overview of the southern literary studies field, including a chronological history from the U.S. colonial era to the present day and theoretical touchstones, while also introducing new methods of reconceiving region and the U.S. South as inherently interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional. The volume will therefore be an invaluable tool for instructors, scholars, students, and members of the general public who are interested in exploring the field further but will also suggest new methods of engaging with regional studies, American studies, American literary studies, and cultural studies.

part I|128 pages

Foundations

chapter |1 pages

Introduction

Foundations

chapter 1|4 pages

Academic Origins of Southern Studies

Spotlight: I'll Take My Stand

chapter 2|4 pages

Antebellum Literature

Spotlight: William Gilmore Simms

chapter 3|4 pages

Appalachian Literature

Spotlight: Ron Rash

chapter 4|4 pages

The Civil War

Spotlight: Augusta Jane Evans

chapter 5|4 pages

Class and Economics

Spotlight: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)

chapter 6|4 pages

Colonial Writing

Spotlight: John Smith

chapter 7|4 pages

Community

Spotlight: Monique Truong

chapter 8|5 pages

Drama

Spotlight: Tennessee Williams

chapter 9|4 pages

Film

Spotlight: Deliverance

chapter 10|4 pages

Foodways

Spotlight: Rick Bragg

chapter 11|4 pages

Gender

Spotlight: Sherley Anne Williams

chapter 12|4 pages

The Global South

Spotlight: Yaa Gyasi

chapter 13|4 pages

The Harlem Renaissance

Spotlight: Jean Toomer

chapter 14|4 pages

Home

Spotlight: Alice Walker

chapter 15|4 pages

Humor

Spotlight: Mark Twain

chapter 16|4 pages

Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Era

Spotlight: To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

chapter 17|4 pages

Local Color and Regionalism

Spotlight: Charles Chesnutt

chapter 18|4 pages

Modernism

Spotlight: William Faulkner

chapter 19|5 pages

Music

Spotlight: The Country–Soul Triangle (Memphis-Muscle Shoals-Nashville)

chapter 20|4 pages

Native Souths

Spotlight: LeAnne Howe

chapter 21|4 pages

Poetry and Verse

Spotlight: Natasha Trethewey

chapter 22|4 pages

Postbellum Literature

Spotlight: Thomas Nelson Page

chapter 23|5 pages

Reconstruction and the New South

Spotlight: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

chapter 24|4 pages

Religion

Spotlight: Flannery O'Connor

chapter 25|4 pages

Science and Technology

Spotlight: Walker Percy

chapter 26|5 pages

Sexuality

Spotlight: Kate Chopin

chapter 27|5 pages

Slave Narratives

Spotlight: Frederick Douglass

chapter 28|4 pages

Southern Gothic

Spotlight: Toni Morrison

chapter 29|4 pages

Southern Periodical Culture

Spotlight: The Double Dealer (1921–1926)

chapter 30|4 pages

Wilderness South

Spotlight: James Kilgo

part II|133 pages

Touchstones

chapter |1 pages

Introduction

Touchstones

chapter 31|5 pages

Anti-Tom Literature

Spotlight: Caroline Lee Hentz

chapter 32|4 pages

Asian American South

Spotlight: Ha Jin

chapter 33|4 pages

Autobiography

Spotlight: Maya Angelou

chapter 34|4 pages

Blues

Spotlight: Langston Hughes

chapter 35|4 pages

Children's Literature

Spotlight: Mildred Taylor

chapter 36|5 pages

Classical Music

Spotlight: James Weldon Johnson

chapter 37|4 pages

Cold War Literature

Spotlight: Ralph Ellison

chapter 38|5 pages

Cosmopolitanism

Spotlight: Edgar Allan Poe

chapter 39|4 pages

Creolization

Spotlight: George Washington Cable

chapter 40|4 pages

Detective and Mystery Fiction

Spotlight: Margaret Maron

chapter 41|4 pages

Early Contact Souths

Spotlight: La Florida

chapter 42|5 pages

Ecocriticism and the Environment

Spotlight: Wendell Berry

chapter 43|4 pages

Feminism

Spotlight: Lee Smith

chapter 44|3 pages

Grit Lit

Spotlight: Larry Brown

chapter 45|4 pages

Hispanophone Literatures

Spotlight: Nineteenth-Century Hispanophone Periodical Poetry

chapter 46|5 pages

Ireland and the U.S. South

Spotlight: Lafcadio Hearn

chapter 47|3 pages

The Lost Cause Myth

Spotlight: Gone with the Wind

chapter 48|4 pages

Masculinity

Spotlight: Robert Penn Warren

chapter 49|4 pages

Migration

Spotlight: Gayl Jones

chapter 50|4 pages

New Southern Studies

Spotlight: Kiese Laymon

chapter 51|4 pages

Nostalgia

Spotlight: Peter Taylor

chapter 52|5 pages

Old Southwestern Humor

Spotlight: Johnson Jones Hooper

chapter 53|4 pages

Plantation Fiction

Spotlight: John Pendleton Kennedy

chapter 54|4 pages

Postbellum Slave Narratives

Spotlight: Booker T. Washington

chapter 55|4 pages

Pre-Invasion Indigenous Texts

Spotlight: Cherokee Oral Stories

chapter 56|5 pages

The Proslavery Argument

Spotlight: James Henry Hammond

chapter 57|4 pages

Southern Diarists

Spotlight: Mary Chesnut

chapter 58|5 pages

Television

Spotlight: Ava DuVernay, Queen Sugar

chapter 59|4 pages

The Transatlantic South

Spotlight: Katherine Anne Porter

chapter 60|3 pages

Virginia before Jefferson

Spotlight: William Byrd II

chapter 61|5 pages

Women's Slave Narratives

Spotlight: Harriet Ann Jacobs

part III|117 pages

Trajectories

chapter |1 pages

Introduction

Trajectories

chapter 62|5 pages

Activism

Spotlight: Toni Cade Bambara

chapter 63|4 pages

Affect

Spotlight: Eudora Welty

chapter 64|4 pages

Afrofuturism

Spotlight: W.E.B. Du Bois

chapter 65|4 pages

Border Souths

Spotlight: Cormac McCarthy

chapter 66|4 pages

The Carceral South

Spotlight: Ernest Gaines

chapter 67|4 pages

Comics in the U.S. South

Spotlight: Nate Powell

chapter 68|4 pages

Disability Studies

Spotlight: Carson McCullers

chapter 69|4 pages

Environmental Refugees

Spotlight: Moira Crone

chapter 70|5 pages

The Freak South

Spotlight: Erskine Caldwell

chapter 71|4 pages

The Gulf South

Spotlight: Jesmyn Ward

chapter 72|5 pages

Hip Hop and the South

Spotlight: Atlanta Hip Hop

chapter 73|4 pages

Lesbian South

Spotlight: Dorothy Allison

chapter 74|4 pages

Mill Town Literature

Spotlight: Wiley Cash

chapter 75|4 pages

Multiethnic Souths

Spotlight: Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge

chapter 76|4 pages

Neo-Slave Narratives

Spotlight: Colson Whitehead

chapter 77|4 pages

New Media

Spotlight: Blake Hausman

chapter 78|4 pages

The Ozarks

Spotlight: Donald Harington

chapter 79|5 pages

Plantationocene

Spotlight: Zora Neale Hurston

chapter 80|5 pages

Queer Souths

Spotlight: Randall Kenan

chapter 81|4 pages

Southern Cityscapes

Spotlight: George Saunders

chapter 82|4 pages

Southern Hyperboles

Spotlight: Lillian Smith

chapter 83|4 pages

Southern Pirates

Spotlight: Joseph Holt Ingraham

chapter 84|4 pages

The Speculative South

Spotlight: Octavia Butler

chapter 85|4 pages

Trans and Non-Binary Souths

Spotlight: Meredith Russo

chapter 86|4 pages

Trauma

Spotlight: William Styron

chapter 87|4 pages

Undead Souths

Spotlight: Dead Birds