1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South
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.
Introduction
Katharine A. Burnett, Todd Hagstette, and Monica Carol Miller
Part I: Foundations
Introduction: Foundations
Todd Hagstette
1. Academic Origins of Southern Studies (Spotlight: I’ll Take My Stand)
Ted Atkinson
2. Antebellum Literature (Spotlight: William Gilmore Simms)
Katharine A. Burnett
3. Appalachian Literature (Spotlight: Ron Rash)
Zackary Vernon
4. The Civil War (Spotlight: Augusta Jane Evans)
Karen Tracey
5. Class and Economics (Spotlight: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941))
David A. Davis
6. Colonial Writing (Spotlight: John Smith)
Dan Waldon
7. Community (Spotlight: Monique Truong)
Elizabeth Gardner
8. Drama (Spotlight: Tennessee Williams)
William Mark Poteet
9. Film (Spotlight: Deliverance)
Robert Jackson
10. Foodways (Spotlight: Rick Bragg)
Erica Abrams Locklear
11. Gender (Spotlight: Sherley Anne Williams)
Michael Bibler
12. The Global South (Spotlight: Yaa Gyasi)
Amy K. King
13. The Harlem Renaissance (Spotlight: Jean Toomer)
Ricardo A. Wilson II
14. Home (Spotlight: Alice Walker)
Nagueyalti Warren
15. Humor (Spotlight: Mark Twain)
John Bird
16. Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Era (Spotlight: To Kill a Mockingbird)
Julie Buckner Armstrong
17. Local Color and Regionalism (Spotlight: Charles Chesnutt)
Bill Hardwig
18. Modernism (Spotlight: William Faulkner)
Thomas F. Haddox
19. Music (Spotlight: The Country-Soul Triangle [Memphis-Muscle Shoals-Nashville])
Ellie Campbell
20. Native Souths (Spotlight: LeAnne Howe)
Kirstin L. Squint
21. Poetry and Verse (Spotlight: Natasha Trethewey)
Christie Collins
22. Postbellum Literature (Spotlight: Thomas Nelson Page)
Christopher Bundrick
23. Reconstruction and the New South (Spotlight: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper)
Sherita Johnson
24. Religion (Spotlight: Flannery O’Connor)
Matt Bryant Cheney
25. Science and Technology (Spotlight: Walker Percy)
Doug Davis
26. Sexuality (Spotlight: Kate Chopin)
Jaime Cantrell
27. Slave Narratives (Spotlight: Frederick Douglass)
Sandra Burr
28. Southern Gothic (Spotlight: Toni Morrison)
Melanie Anderson
29. Southern Periodical Culture (Spotlight: The Double Dealer [1921-1926])
Sian Round
30. Wilderness South (Spotlight: James Kilgo)
Anthony Dyer Hoefer
Part II: Touchstones
Introduction: Touchstones
Katharine A. Burnett
31. Anti-Tom Literature (Spotlight: Caroline Lee Hentz)
Peter Templeton
32. Asian American South (Spotlight: Ha Jin)
Suzanne Kamata
33. Autobiography (Spotlight: Maya Angelou)
Matthew Sutton
34. Blues (Spotlight: Langston Hughes)
Elizabeth LeRud
35. Children’s Literature (Spotlight: Mildred Taylor)
Laura Hakala
36. Classical Music (Spotlight: James Weldon Johnson)
Tamyln Avery
37. Cold War Literature (Spotlight: Ralph Ellison)
Atsushi Marutani
38. Cosmopolitanism (Spotlight: Edgar Allan Poe)
Kristopher Mecholsky
39. Creolization (Spotlight: George Washington Cable)
Amanda M. Capelli
40. Detective and Mystery Fiction (Spotlight: Margaret Maron)
John Jebb
41. Early Contact Souths (Spotlight: La Florida)
E. Thomson Shields, Jr.
42. Ecocriticism and the Environment (Spotlight: Wendell Berry)
Sarah-Marie Horning
43. Feminism (Spotlight: Lee Smith)
Monica Carol Miller
44. Grit Lit (Spotlight: Larry Brown)
Peter Jay Ingrao
45. Hispanophone Literatures (Spotlight: Nineteenth-Century Hispanophone Periodical Poetry)
Ayendy Bonifacio
46. Ireland and the U.S. South (Spotlight: Lafcadio Hearn)
Jessica L. Martell
47. The Lost Cause Myth (Spotlight: Gone with the Wind)
Sean Heuston
48. Masculinity (Spotlight: Robert Penn Warren)
Wes Berry
49. Migration (Spotlight: Gayl Jones)
Joanna Davis-McElligatt
50. New Southern Studies (Spotlight: Kiese Laymon)
Kathryn McKee
51. Nostalgia (Spotlight: Peter Taylor)
W. Matthew J. Simmons
52. Old Southwestern Humor (Spotlight: Johnson Jones Hooper)
John Miller
53. Plantation Fiction (Spotlight: John Pendleton Kennedy)
Christopher Bundrick
54. Postbellum Slave Narratives (Spotlight: Booker T. Washington)
Adam Yeich
55. Pre-Invasion Indigenous Texts (Spotlight: Cherokee Oral Stories)
Eric Gary Anderson
56. The Proslavery Argument (Spotlight: James Henry Hammond)
Todd Hagstette
57. Southern Diarists (Spotlight: Mary Chesnut)
Julia Nitz
58. Television (Spotlight: Ava DuVernay, Queen Sugar)
Stephanie Rountree
59. The Transatlantic South (Spotlight: Katherine Anne Porter)
Joseph Kuhn
60. Virginia before Jefferson (Spotlight: William Byrd II)
Amanda Louise Johnson
61. Women’s Slave Narratives (Spotlight: Harriet Ann Jacobs)
Delphine Louis-Dimitrov
Part III: Trajectories
Introduction: Trajectories
Monica Carol Miller
62. Activism (Spotlight: Toni Cade Bambara)
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder
63. Affect (Spotlight: Eudora Welty)
Jill Fennell
64. Afrofuturism (Spotlight: W.E.B. Du Bois)
Samanda Robinson
65. Border Souths (Spotlight: Cormac McCarthy)
Sally Ann Schutz
66. The Carceral South (Spotlight: Ernest Gaines)
Elizabeth Steeby
67. Comics in the U.S. South (Spotlight: Nate Powell)Matthew Teutsch
68. Disability Studies (Spotlight: Carson McCullers)
Bruce Henderson
69. Environmental Refugees (Spotlight: Moira Crone)
Zackary Vernon
70. The Freak South (Spotlight: Erskine Caldwell)
Erik Kline
71. The Gulf South (Spotlight: Jesmyn Ward)
Jim Coby
72. Hip Hop and the South (Spotlight: Atlanta Hip Hop)
Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis
73. Lesbian South (Spotlight: Dorothy Allison)
Jamie Harker
74. Mill Town Literature (Spotlight: Wiley Cash)
Jimmy Dean Smith
75. Multiethnic Souths (Spotlight: Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge)
Amy Schmidt
76. Neo-Slave Narratives (Spotlight: Colson Whitehead)
Allison Harris
77. New Media (Spotlight: Blake Hausman)
Gina Caison
78. The Ozarks (Spotlight: Donald Harington)
Joe Farmer
79. Plantationocene (Spotlight Randall Kenan)
Sandra Burr
80. Queer Souths (Spotlight: Randall Kenan)
Eric Solomon
81. Southern Cityscapes (Spotlight: George Saunders)
William Murray
82. Southern Hyperboles (Spotlight: Lillian Smith)
Michał Choiński
83. Southern Pirates (Spotlight: Joseph Holt Ingraham)
Kathleen Crosby
84. The Speculative South (Spotlight: Octavia Butler)
Ellie Campbell
85. Trans and Non-Binary Souths (Spotlight: Meredith Russo)
Phillip "Pip" Gordon
86. Trauma (Spotlight: William Styron)
Jean W. Cash
87. Undead Souths (Spotlight: Dead Birds)Eric Gary Anderson
88. Understanding Southern Studies and Cultural Studies
Jennie Lightweis-Goff
Biography
Katharine A. Burnett is Associate Professor of English at Fisk University, USA.
Todd Hagstette is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Aiken, USA.
Monica Carol Miller is Assistant Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University, USA.
"One echo above all came to mind when I read the introduction and contents of the new Routledge Companion to Southern Literature: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Jefferson has been placed in both categories over the long haul of southern studies. The editors and contributors to this new volume should be looked at as significant "refreshers." How far we have come from Jay Hubbell's The South in American Literature."
-Michael Kreyling, author of Inventing Southern Literature (1998) and The South That Wasn't There (2010)
