Reviewing the South

Sarah Gardner is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Southern Studies at Mercer University, Georgia where she teaches courses on the American South, nineteenth-century America, and print culture. She is the author of Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937 (2012) and co-editor of Voices of the American South (2004).

'Gardner, one of America's leading literary historians, offers strikingly fresh insights into the South and the nation between the World Wars. In shifting our focus from authors to the commercial book industry, Gardner reveals a world of reviewers, readers, and publishers, a culture that has remained largely hidden until now. This book will shape our understanding of American literary history for years to come.' Jonathan Daniel Wells, University of Michigan

• Introduction: from Renaissance to reformation; 1. The world the reviewers made; 2. The cultural economy of reading in the interwar years; 3. The South meets Harlem; 4. Confronting Jim Crow; 5. Away down South in the land of problems; 6. A class of burden bearers; 7. The most audacious book ever written by Southerners; 8. Fiction fights the Civil War; Epilogue.