A History of the Literature of the U.S. South: Volume 1

Harilaos Stecopoulos is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and US Imperialisms, 1898-1976 (2008) and co-editor of the Race and the Subject of Masculinities (1997).

Introduction. Reconstructing literary history Harilaos Stecopoulos; 1. Fictions of the native south Melanie Benson Taylor; 2. John Smith and the English origins of southern exceptionalism Rob McLoone; 3. Plantation and enlightenment Jennifer Greeson; 4. Geoconfederacy; or, Bartram's Southern archipelago Monique Allewaert; 5. In the shadow of his office: architectures of affect in Jefferson's notes on the State of Virginia Laura Rigal; 6. Shadows of Haiti: racing gender, violence and sentiment in Victor Séjour, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Charles Chesnutt Susan Castillo Street; 7. 'Midnight bakings' amid starvation: food and aesthetics in the slave narrative Stephanie Tsank; 8. A calculated fiction: antebellum plantation romances Katharine Burnett; 9. Maroons and marronage in antebellum African American literature Sean Gerrity; 10. Everyday literary culture in the nineteenth century Christopher Hager and Beth Barton Schweiger; 11.'Fables of the Bloody Shirt': reconstruction and the problem of national violence Scott Romine; 12. A heritage unique in the ages: the politics of black southern womanhood in Anna Julia Cooper's a voice from the south by a black woman from the south Joanna Davis-McElligatt; 13. Moonlight and magnolias no more: the new plantation tradition and its respondents Justin Mellette; 14. Women writers and the southern renaissance; or, the work of gender in literary periodization Jay Watson; 15. Southern geographies and new Negro modernism Thadious Davis; 16. 'A fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA': Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, Bontemps and the depression south Martyn Bone; 17. Provincialism as a positive good: agrarianism and its afterlives Jon Smith; 18. Faulkner's untimely fictions John Matthews; 19. Reconsidering Du Bois's 'Central Text': W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Wright, and the problem of the 'Black Worker' Konstantina Karageorgos; 20. Cultural activism and theater of the Civil Rights Movement Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder; 21. Till the hurt becomes music: gnosticism and improvisation in the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa Herman Beavers; 22. Undead sound; or, why southern poetry is not dead: the undying work of fathers in Natasha Trethewey, Adam Vines, and Cormac McCarthy Daniel Turner; 23. There is no south: the weird Plantationocene of Jeff VanderMeer's southern reach trilogy Amy Clukey; 24. Hurricane Alley: literature of the coastal south in a time of climate change Valerie Loichot.