Since the publication of her first novel in 2008, Jesmyn Ward has established herself as arguably the most important U.S. author of the twenty-first century. This book considers the full range of her career thus far, including National Book Award–winning novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing, as well as Ward’s widely acclaimed memoir, Men We Reaped.Martyn Bone thoughtfully examines key themes running throughout Ward’s writing: Black life in the...

This book explores how an eclectic selection of narratives and images of the American South have been created and consumed. The thirteen essays move beyond both traditional accounts of southern identity as either declining or enduring, and more recent postmodernist accounts of the South as imagined or invented. Instead, the contributors emphasize how narratives and images of "the South" have real social, political, and economic ramifications, and that they register at various local, region...

For generations, southern novelists and critics have grappled with a concept that is widely seen as a trademark of their literature: a strong attachment to geography, or a "sense of place." In the 1930s, the Agrarians accorded special meaning to rural life, particularly the farm, in their definitions of southern identity. For them, the South seemed an organic and rooted region in contrast to the North, where real estate development and urban sprawl evoked a faceless, raw capitalism. By the...

Where the New World Is assesses how fiction published since 1980 has resituated the U.S. South globally and how earlier twentieth-century writing already had done so in ways traditional southern literary studies tended to ignore. Martyn Bone argues that this body of fiction has, over the course of some eighty years, challenged received readings and understandings of the U.S. South as a fixed place largely untouched by immigration (or even internal migration) and economic globaliza...

In Keywords for Southern Studies, editors Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson have compiled an eclectic collection of new essays that address the fluidity of southern studies by adopting a transnational, interdisciplinary focus. The essays are structured around critical terms pertinent both to the field and to modern life in general.The nonbinary, nontraditional approach of Keywords unmasks and refutes standard binary thinking—First World/Third World, self/other...

“This is a remarkable collection of essays. Citizenship clearly forms the backbone for these investigations but the range of the contributors’ backgrounds (in terms of disciplinary training) and the approaches they take to the question makes this collection both broad and deep. As it turns out, there is no other way to tackle a concept as central but also as slippery as citizenship. A shorter or more focused collection would miss the nuances and insights that this one offers.”—Aaron Sheeha...

Contributions by Melanie R. Benson, Thomas Ærvold, Bjerre, Martyn Bone, Mark S. Graybill, Richard E. Lee, Kenneth Millard, James B. Potts III, Scott Romine, Matthew Shipe, and Daniel E. WilliamsPerspectives on Barry Hannah is a collection of essays devoted to the work of the award-winning fiction writer Barry Hannah (1942–2010). The anthology features a broad range of critical approaches and covers the span of Hannah's career from Geronimo Rex (1972) to Yonder...

Perspectives on Barry Hannah is a collection of essays devoted to the work of the award-winning fiction writer Barry Hannah. The anthology features a broad range of critical approaches and covers the span of Hannah's career from Geronimo Rex (1972) to Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001). The book also includes a previously unpublished interview with Hannah.The ten essays cover all of Hannah's thirteen published books. The contributors give fresh perspectives...

Making Whiteness is a profoundly important work that explains how and why whiteness came to be such a crucial, embattled--and distorting--component of twentieth-century American identity. In intricately textured detail and with passionately mastered analysis, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners re-established their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical ...

Eggleston, the iconoclastic and colorful groundbreaker, imbues the mundane with vibrancy.This article appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Southern Cultures:The Photography Issue. “When the color photographs of William Eggleston first appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, the boldness of Eggleston’s palette and his disregard for the conventions of black-and-white photography were shocking; nearly all the major critics were scornful, and Ansel Adams wrote a scathing letter of protest...

"Compton pushes us to look beneath the surface—past those comforting tales of nationhood and racial solidarity—to the more nebulous and ever-shifting truth. This is a brilliant and original work that should be mandatory reading for any student of race and history."—Danzy Senna, author of CaucasiaAfter Canaan, the first nonfiction book by acclaimed African Canadian poet Wayde Compton, repositions the North American discussion of race in the wake of the tumultuous t...

Considers the misappropriation of African American popular culture through various genres, largely Hip Hop, to argue that while such cultural creations have the potential to be healing agents, they are still exploited -often with the complicity of African Americans- for commercial purposes and to maintain white ruling class hegemony.