Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 19)

This book is a major reassessment of an American region and a regional consciousness. Concentrating on moments of crisis in Southern history, as well as on major literary figures, Richard Gray shows how generations of Southerners have been engaged in 'writing the South', in reinventing their place even as they describe it. The first half of the book focuses on the colonial period, when the first white settlers tried to understand an unfamiliar land by seeing it in terms of familiar mythology; the years immediately prior to the Civil War, when the South had to defend its 'peculiar institution' of slavery; and the later nineteenth century, when Southerners were struggling to justify their past, explain the present, and prophesy the future. In the second half Dr Gray looks in detail at the twentieth-century South, and particularly at major writers of the Southern renaissance, such as William Faulkner and the Nashville Agrarians.