The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South--global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South--that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.

Fred Hobson is Professor of English and Lineberger Professor of the Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of, among other works, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (LSU, l983), Mencken: A Life (Random House, 1994), But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (LSU, 1999), and The Silencing of Emily Mullen and Other Essays (LSU, 2005). He edits the Southern Literary Studies series at Louisiana State University Press and is co-editor, with Minrose Gwin, of the Southern Literary Journal. Barbara Ladd is Professor of English at Emory University. She is the author of Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner (LSU 1996) and Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty (LSU 2007).