This book traces the origin and development of several propositions, tropes, types, clichés, and ideas commonly associated with the U.S. South—for example, that it has been shaped by a warm climate; that its people are hospitable and enjoy a slower pace of life; that it is characterized by localist tendencies and possesses a distinctive sense of place.Approaching these propositions as memes—that is, group-forming replicators—Scott Romine argues that many of them developed in defens...

As a way to comment on a person’s style or taste, the word “tacky” has distinctly southern origins, with its roots tracing back to the so-called “tackies” who tacked horses on South Carolina farms prior to the Civil War. The Tacky South presents eighteen fun, insightful essays that examine connections between tackiness and the American South, ranging from nineteenth-century local color fiction and the television series Murder, She Wrote to red velvet cake and the ubiquito...

In this stimulating study, Scott Romine explores the impact of globalization on contemporary southern culture and the South's persistence in an age of media and what he terms "cultural reproduction." Rather than being compromised, Romine asserts, southern cultures are both complicated and reconfigured as they increasingly detach from tradition in its conventional sense. In considering Souths that might appear fake -- the Souths of the theme restaurant, commercial television, and popular re...

Moving beyond familiar myths about moonshiners, bootleggers, and hard-drinking writers, Southern Comforts explores how alcohol and drinking helped shape the literature and culture of the U.S. South.Edited by Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger, this collection of seventeen thought-provoking essays proposes that discussions about drinking in southern culture often orbit around familiar figures and mythologies that obscure what alcohol consumption has meant over time. Comple...

Georgia has played a formative role in the writing of America. Few states have produced a more impressive array of literary figures, among them Conrad Aiken, Erskine Caldwell, James Dickey, Joel Chandler Harris, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Jean Toomer, and Alice Walker.This volume contains biographical and critical discussions of Georgia writers from the nineteenth century to the present as well as other information pertinent to Georgia literature. Organized in alphabetica...

What is the difference between a star born in the South and a “southern star”? In Southerners Acting Southern, Tison Pugh answers this intriguing question, pondering the ways in which some performers from the South metamorphose into southern stars by accentuating their geographic and cultural roots as key aspects of their star personas.Many celebrities, particularly actors, seek to transcend their hometown roots in favor of achieving an “all-American” appeal, but some star...

Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies expands the geographical scope of scholarship about southern swamps. Although the physical environments that form its central subjects are scattered throughout the southeastern United States—the Atchafalaya, the Okefenokee, the Mississippi River delta, the Everglades, and the Great Dismal Swamp—this evocative collection challenges fixed notions of place and foregrounds the ways in which ecosystems shape cultures and creations on both l...

As the planet faces ever-worsening disruptions to global ecosystems—carbon and chemical emissions, depletions of the ozone layer, the loss of biodiversity, rising sea levels, air toxification, and worsening floods and droughts—scholars across academia must examine the cultural effects of this increasingly postnatural world. That task proves especially vital for southern studies, given how often the U.S. South serves as a site for large-scale damming initiatives like the TVA, disasters on t...

Focusing on the crucial period of 1820 to 1860, Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster examines the strong economic bonds between the antebellum plantation South and the burgeoning city of New York that resulted from the highly lucrative trade in cotton. In this richly detailed work of literary and cultural history, Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. charts how the partnership brought fantastic wealth to both the South and Gotham during the first half of the nineteenth century. That mutually be...

"A sweeping yet rigorous analysis of Dixon and his work. The collection approaches the southern intellectual through multiple methodologies -- from literary theory and film studies to social history and religious studies. We get an exhaustive yet diverse perspective on Dixon's influence and legacy." -- Journal of American HistoryThomas Dixon Jr. (1864--1946), best remembered today as the author of the racist novels that served as the basis for D. W. Griffith's controversial 1915 cla...

In Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth confronts why the environmental stories told about the U.S. South curve inevitably toward distressing plotlines. Examining more than a dozen works of postbellum literature and cinema, Spoth’s analysis winds from John Muir’s walking journey across the war-torn South, through the troubling of southern environmentalism’s modernity by Faulkner and Hurston, past the accounts of its acceleration in Welty and O’Connor, and finally into the present, un...

Dangerous Innocence investigates how prevailing constructions of white masculinity in the U.S. South help feed and reinforce systems of racial inequity. Tracing the rise of the “southern outsider” in literature and on television from 1960 to 2020, William P. Murray probes white Americans’ enduring desire to assert their own blamelessness even though such acts of self-justification facilitate continued violence against historically oppressed populations. Dangerous Innocence