Storytelling, History, And The Postmodern South (southern Literary Studies) [Hardcover]

In this innovative collection, Jason Phillips and ten other historians and literary scholars explore the enduring dynamic between history, literature, and power in the American South. Blending analysis with storytelling, and professional insights with personal experiences, they deconstruct Dixie, insisting that writing the South s history means harnessing, not criticizing, the inherent power of narrative.

Contributors examine white southern narratives from multiple, fresh perspectives and consider ways in which storytelling helped shape identity and mold scholarship over time. Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that William Percy s life and work blurred fact and fiction as he negotiated the anti-intellectual conventions of a rural, hierarchical South as a cosmopolitan and homosexual. Orville Vernon Burton and Ian Binnington investigate nationalism, local allegiances, and the imagined community of the Confederacy. Farrell O Gorman, Jewel L. Spangler, David A. Davis, Robert Jackson, Anne Marshall, K. Stephen Prince, and Jim Downs explore diverse topics such as southern Gothic fiction and the centrality of religion, white trash autobiographies, the professional southerner in literature and criticism, and the one-drop rule of racial taxonomy in America.

These writers look beyond ideology and race, showcasing new ways of interpreting texts and encouraging historians and literary scholars to move beyond theory to engage the historical context of southern stories and storytelling.