Creating and Consuming the American South

“This wide-ranging volume reminds us consistently that the U.S. South has always been an invention but one that exerts uncanny mobility across multiple borders and histories.”—Melanie Benson Taylor, author ofReconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause

“The quality and variety of the essays, the intelligent introduction, the rich topic, and the suggestive perspective add up to an important volume. It furthers thinking and analysis of the south in world context and theoretical dimensions.”—James L. Peacock, author of Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World

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, regional, national, and transnational scales.

Featuring distinguished scholars writing from a wide range of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives--history, literary studies, performance studies, popular music, and queer studies--the volume both challenges and expands on established understandings of how, when, where, and why ideas of the South have been developed and disseminated.

Martyn Bone is associate professor of American literature at the University of Copenhagen.Brian Ward is professor in American studies at Northumbria University. William A. Link is Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida. They are coeditors ofCreating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South and The American South and the Atlantic World.