Scott Romine - Böcker

In this succinct study, Scott Romine considers a key paradox that has been associated with the concept of ""community"" from the beginning of modern southern literary criticism: namely, that communities often valued for their cohesiveness and moral stability were at the same time sites of oppression along race and class lines. How were communities so deeply divided able to maintain even the appearance of organic cohesiveness? The Narrative Forms of Southern Community contains close readings of five narratives, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn, Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia, William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee, and William Faulkner's Light in August, that attempt to mediate or negotiate the social tensions inherent in the stratified world they represent.Whereas most earlier examinations of community are thematically oriented, this study focuses on the formal structures, framing techniques, narrative stylistics, master codes, and collective plots, among others, that allow the narrative in question to recover an image of an ideal social order. In particular, this book traces the narrative strategies of deferral, displacement, and evasion that enable what can be thought of as ""simulated consensus,"" a paradox that informs all of the works under discussion. Romine, in arguing against the idea of community as a group of like-minded individuals, suggests that community is better conceived as a social group that, lacking a commonly held view of reality, connects by means of norms, codes, and manners that produce an artificial, or at least symbolically constituted, social reality.Romine realises the complexity of the concept of community and appreciates the challenges facing those who wrestle with its questions. By exploring the various ways in which writers associated with the cultural status quo attempt to rationalize the oppressive nature of society, this first book-length study of community in southern literature contributes greatly to current revisionary reappraisals by going beyond many of the old assumptions.

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 regional magazines, for example - Romine contends that authenticity and reality emerge as central concepts that allow groups and individuals to imagine and navigate social worlds.Romine addresses a major critical problem - ""authenticity"" - in a fundamentally new manner. Less concerned with what actually constitutes an ""authentic"" or ""real"" South than in how these concepts are used today, The Real South explores a wide range of southern narratives that describe and travel through virtual, simulated, and commodified Souths. Where earlier critics have tended to assume a real or authentic South, Romine questions such assumptions and whether the ""authentic South"" ever truly existed.From Gone with the Wind, Civil War reenactments, and a tennis community outside Atlanta called Tara, to the work of Josephine Humphreys, the travel narrative of V. S. Naipaul, and the historical fiction of Lewis Nordan, Romine examines how narratives (and spaces) are used to fashion social solidarity and cultural continuity in a time of fragmentation and change. Far from deteriorating or disappearing in a global economy, Romine shows, the South continues to be reproduced and used by diverse groups engaged in diverse cultural projects.

Mark Twain's visions of the Mississippi River offer some of the most indelible images in American literature: Huck and Jim floating downstream on their raft, Tom Sawyer and friends becoming pirates on Jackson's Island, the young Sam Clemens himself at the wheel of a steamboat. Through Twain's iconic river books, the Mississippi has become an imagined river as much as a real one. Yet despite the central place that Twain's river occupies in the national imaginary, until now no work has explored the shifting meaning of this crucial connection in a single volume.Thomas Ruys Smith's Deep Water: The Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain is the first book to provide a comprehensive narrative account of Twain's intimate and long-lasting creative engagement with the Mississippi. This expansive study traces two separate but richly intertwined stories of the river as America moved from the aftermath of the Civil War toward modernity. It follows Twain's remarkable connection to the Mississippi, from his early years on the river as a steamboat pilot, through his most significant literary statements, to his final reflections on the crooked stream that wound its way through his life and imagination. Alongside Twain's evolving relationship to the river, Deep Water details the thriving cultural life of the Mississippi in this period, from roustabouts to canoeists, from books for boys to blues songs, and highlights a diverse collection of voices each telling their own story of the river. Smith weaves together these perspectives, putting Twain and his creations in conversation with a dynamic cast of river characters who helped transform the Mississippi into a vibrant American icon.By balancing evocative cultural history with thought-provoking discussions of some of Twain's most important and beloved works, Deep Water gives readers a new sense of both the Mississippi and the remarkable writer who made the river his own.

In Southern Hyperboles: Metafigurative Strategies of Narration, Micha? Choi?ski confronts the often paradoxical and excessive elements of southern literature, focusing on dominant narrative modes and representation strategies in works produced from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. With renewed attention to renderings of the gothic and grotesque, Choi?ski argues that modernist literature from the U.S. South often deploys the trope of hyperbole, which escalates contrasts and disrupts the sense of the normal.By focusing on how writers processed the South via narratives of hyperbolic excess, Southern Hyperboles explores a mode of comprehension forged from the tensions of a segregated, patriarchal society driven by racial and social decorum. Moving chronologically, Choi?ski traces distinct manifestations of hyperbolic metalogic in the works of seven authors: Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Lillian Smith, Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, and Harper Lee. The mode of hyperbole identified by Choi?ski relies on a clash of opposites, along with the rapid intensification of disharmonious ideas pushed to extremes, leading to an ultimate break in established decorum. The shock produced by hyperbole generates a momentary state of confusion that soon dissipates, allowing recipients to reach a new understanding of their surrounding world.Melding an innovative use of rhetorical theory with fine-grained analysis of literary texts, Southern Hyperboles elucidates contradictory and interlocking issues related to memory, social trauma, grotesquerie, and troubled mythologies that permeate the U.S. South.

In Belles and Poets, Julia Nitz analyzes the Civil War diary writing of eight white women from the U.S. South, focusing specifically on how they made sense of the world around them through references to literary texts. Nitz finds that many diarists incorporated allusions to poems, plays, and novels, especially works by Shakespeare and the British Romantic poets, in moments of uncertainty and crisis. While previous studies have overlooked or neglected such literary allusions in personal writings, regarding them as mere embellishments or signs of elite social status, Nitz reveals that these references functioned as codes through which women diarists contemplated their roles in society and addressed topics related to slavery, Confederate politics, gender, and personal identity.Nitz's innovative study of identity construction and literary intertextuality focuses on diaries written by the following women: Eliza Frances (Fanny) Andrews of Georgia (1840-1931), Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut of South Carolina (1823-1886), Malvina Sara Black Gist of South Carolina (1842-1930), Sarah Ida Fowler Morgan of Louisiana (1842-1909), Cornelia Peake McDonald of Virginia (1822-1909), Judith White Brockenbrough McGuire of Virginia (1813-1897), Sarah Katherine (Kate) Stone of Louisiana (1841-1907), and Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas of Georgia (1843-1907). These women's diaries circulated in postwar commemoration associations, and several saw publication. The public acclaim they received helped shape the collective memory of the war and, according to Nitz, further legitimized notions of racial supremacy and segregation. Comparing and contrasting their own lives to literary precedents and fictional role models allowed the diarists to process the privations of war, the loss of family members, and the looming defeat of the Confederacy. Belles and Poets establishes the extent to which literature offered a means of exploring ideas and convictions about class, gender, and racial hierarchies in the Civil War-era South. Nitz's work shows that literary allusions in wartime diaries expose the ways in which some white southern women coped with the war and its potential threats to their way of life.

Drawing from recent debates about the validity of regional studies and skepticism surrounding the efficacy of the concept of authenticity, Clare Chadd's Postregional Fictions focuses on questions of southern regional authenticity in fiction published by Barry Hannah from 1972 to 2001. The first monograph on the Mississippi author's work to appear since his death, this study considers the ways in which Hannah's novels and short stories challenge established conceptual understandings of the U.S. South. Hannah's writing often features elements of metafiction, through which the putative sense of ""southernness"" his stories dramatize is complicated by an intense self-reflexivity about the extent to which a sense of place has never been foundational or essential but has always been constructed and performed. Such texts locate a productive terrain between the local and the global, with particular relevance for critical apprehensions of the post-South and postsouthern literature. Offering sustained close readings of selected stories, and focusing especially on Hannah's late work, Chadd argues that his fiction reveals the region constantly shifting in a process of mythmaking, dialogue, and performance. In turn, she uses Hannah's work to suggest how notions of the ""South"" and ""southernness"" might survive the various deconstructive approaches leveled against them in recent decades of southern studies scholarship. Rather than seeing an impasse between the regional and the global, Chadd's reading of Hannah shows the two existing and flourishing in tandem.In Postregional Fictions, Chadd offers a new interpretation of Hannah based on an appreciation of the vital intersection of southern and postmodern elements in his work.

Faulknerista collects more than twenty years of critically influential scholarship by Catherine Gunther Kodat on the writings of one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century, William Faulkner. Initially composed as freestanding essays and now updated and revised, the book's nine chapters place Faulkner's work in the context of current debates concerning the politics of white authors who write about race, queer sexualities, and the use of the N-word in literature and popular culture. The Faulknerista of the title is a critic who tackles these debates without fear or favor, balancing admiration with skepticism in a manner that establishes a new model for single-author scholarship that is both historically grounded (for women have been writing about Faulkner, and talking back to him, since the beginning of his career) and urgently contemporary. Beginning with an introduction that argues for the critical importance of women's engagement with Faulkner's fiction, through comparative discussions pairing it with works by Toni Morrison, Jean-Luc Godard, Quentin Tarantino, and David Simon, Faulknerista offers a valuable resource for students, scholars, and general readers, written in an accessible style and aimed at stimulating discussions of Faulkner's work and the rich interpretive challenges it continues to present.

Faulknerista collects more than twenty years of critically influential scholarship by Catherine Gunther Kodat on the writings of one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century, William Faulkner. Initially composed as freestanding essays and now updated and revised, the book's nine chapters place Faulkner's work in the context of current debates concerning the politics of white authors who write about race, queer sexualities, and the use of the N-word in literature and popular culture. The Faulknerista of the title is a critic who tackles these debates without fear or favor, balancing admiration with skepticism in a manner that establishes a new model for single-author scholarship that is both historically grounded (for women have been writing about Faulkner, and talking back to him, since the beginning of his career) and urgently contemporary. Beginning with an introduction that argues for the critical importance of women's engagement with Faulkner's fiction, through comparative discussions pairing it with works by Toni Morrison, Jean-Luc Godard, Quentin Tarantino, and David Simon, Faulknerista offers a valuable resource for students, scholars, and general readers, written in an accessible style and aimed at stimulating discussions of Faulkner's work and the rich interpretive challenges it continues to present.

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 beneficial alliance also cemented New York's reputation as the northern metropolis most supportive of and hospitable to southerners. Both parties initially found the commercial and cultural entente advantageous, but their collaboration grew increasingly fraught by the 1840s as rising abolitionist sentiment in the North decried the system of chattel slavery that made possible the mass production of cotton. In an effort to stem the swelling tide of abolitionism, conservative southerners demanded absolute political fealty to their peculiar institution from the city that had profited most from the cotton trade. By 1861, reactionary circles in the South viewed New York's failure to extend such unalloyed validation as the betrayal of an erstwhile ally that in the words of one polemicist deemed Gotham worthy of being "blotted from the list of cities."Drawing on contemporary letters, diaries, fiction, and travel writings, Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster provides the first detailed study of the complicated relationship between the antebellum South and New York City in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

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, uncovering how the tragic econarrative is transformed by contemporary food studies, climate fiction, and speculative tales inspired by the region.Phrased as a reaction to the rising temperatures and swelling sea levels in the South, Ruin and Resilience conceptualizes an environmental, ecocritical ethos for the southern United States that takes account of its fundamentally vulnerable status and navigates the space between its reactionary politics and its ecological failures.

The Dirty South examines the shifting significances of the South as a constructed, fantasized region in the American psyche, particularly its frequent association with tropes of dirt that emphasize soil, garbage, trash, grit, litter, mud, swamp water, slime, and pollution. Beginning with iconic works from the 1970s such as Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, James A. Crank traces the image of a "dirty" South into the twenty-first century to explore the social, political, and psychological effects of the region's hold on the imaginations of southerners and nonsoutherners alike.With a focus on media forms through which southern identity gets articulated and questioned—including horror movies, Swamp Thing comics, and popular music by artists such as Waylon Jennings and OutKast—The Dirty South probes the sustained fascination with southern dirtiness while reflecting on its causes and consequences since the end of the civil rights era. Highlighting the period from 1970 to 2020, during which the South began to represent several new possible identities for the nation as a whole and for the area itself, Crank considers the ways that southerners have used depictions of dirt to create and police boundaries and to contest those boundaries. Each chapter pairs prominent literary or cultural texts from the 1970s with more contemporary works, such as Jordan Peele's film Get Out, which recycle similar investments or, critically, challenge the inherent whiteness of the earlier images.By historicizing fantasies of the region and connecting them to the first decades of the twenty-first century, The Dirty South reveals that notions about southern dirtiness proliferate not because they lend authenticity or relevancy to the U.S. South, but because they aid so conspicuously in the zombified work of tethering investors (real and imagined) to a graveyard of ideas.

Now back in print, Vereen M. Bell's The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy was the first critical book devoted to an author who would become one of the most celebrated American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Published in 1988, before McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and had his novels adapted into acclaimed films, Bell's study offered the first systematic review of the author's work.According to Bell, part of the difficulty of analyzing McCarthy's fiction is that the novelist by design works against all conventional ways of seeing and dealing with the world. Any formulaic readings, particularly those associated with the traditional schemes of southern literature, will be distorted. McCarthy's novels are provocatively mysterious yet specific and vivid as well. They are also freestanding and unclassifiableBell shows how McCarthy transforms the world through language, how he reconstitutes both urban and rural settings so that otherwise barely articulate and unheroic people live vividly in a context that is both modernist and antimodernist. In this respect, Bell argues, McCarthy's work is about the tension between visions of the world and the intractable, opposing materiality of it, between the mysteriousness of an individual's private engagement with experience and social normality's tendency to flatten it out. At the same time, Bell shows McCarthy's infatuation with the reality of evil, how the evil in human form in his novels is as inexplicably gratuitous and violent as the inhuman form of random and destructive natural events. Such violence, for McCarthy, is built into existence and cannot be evaded or rationalized away.With detailed readings of McCarthy's first five novels—The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian—Bell demonstrates the novelist's faith in the protean capacity of language to disclose the layered possibilities and richness of being. Widely cited by scholars, Bell's book established many of the foundational critical frameworks for approaching McCarthy's work. It is now available in an affordable paperback edition.

With this study Karl F. Zender offers fresh readings of individual novels, themes, and motifs while also assessing the impact of recent politicized interpretations on our understanding of Faulkner's achievement. Sympathetically acknowledging the need to decenter the canon, Zender's searching interrogation of current theory clears a breathing space for Faulkner and his readers between the fustier remnants of New Criticism and the excesses of post-structuralism.Each chapter opens with a balanced presentation of the genuine gifts contemporary theory has bestowed on our comprehension of a particular novel or problem in Faulkner criticism and then proceeds with a groundbreaking reading. "The Politics of Incest" challenges older psychoanalytic interpretations of Faulkner's use of the incest motif, and "Faulkner's Privacy" defends the novelist's difficulty or "reticence" as an aesthetic resistance against the rude candor of deregionalized and depersonalized culture. Subsequent chapters take up the volatile issues of Faulkner's representations of women and of African Americans, and a close reading of the classic "Barn Burning" critiques the current tendency to blur the concepts of patriarchy and paternity. The elegiac final chapter, "Where is Yoknapatawpha County?" draws on a comparison with John Updike's Pennsylvania fiction and a reading of Joan Williams's The Wintering to explore Faulkner's disinclination to represent the quotidian realities of southern life in his later novels. Zender shows that Faulkner's stylistic withdrawal attempts to "transform into beauty" his alienation from the postwar world and his fear of aging. That Faulkner and the Politics of Reading itself recovers and gives new luster to Faulkner's beauty will surely please, in the author's words, "those readers . . . for whom literature is less a mechanism of social change than a source of pleasure." The originality of its critical vision will inspire Faulkner scholars, students of American literature, and general readers.

America's Imagined Revolution explores the Reconstruction period after the Civil War to ask narratological, historiographical, and theoretical questions about how slave emancipation has (and has not) been theorized as revolution. Reading historical fiction by authors such as George Washington Cable, Albion Tourgée, Charles Chesnutt, Frances Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois in dialogue with nineteenth-century historical writing—and the era's legal, political, and print culture—Tomos Wallbank-Hughes excavates an evanescent form of historicist writing sensitive to the revolutionary changes that shaped life in the emancipation-era South.As an aesthetic form, the historical novel of Reconstruction poses questions about revolutionary experience in plantation societies, and in the process challenges critical assumptions about historical time in the nineteenth century: How do authors narrate epochal change that also feels like retrenchment? In what direction does history travel if it does not progress? What narratives of race, class, and region encompass both continued domination and ruptured power? By plumbing the situations that give it form, the historical novel of Reconstruction provides a window into the literary culture of the South's long nineteenth century in which, rather than a storehouse of tradition, the region became a terrain for interpreting social revolution and uncovering slavery's revolutionary afterlives.America's Imagined Revolution offers a new interpretation of the literary and historiographical significance of the Reconstruction period and its relationship to American literary history.

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 courses from popular television such as The Andy Griffith Show and The Waltons through influential fiction by Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other prominent southern authors—alongside forceful challenges voiced by Black writers including Chester Himes and Ernest Gaines—before turning to works created after the September 11 attacks that reinscribe cultural logics predicated on protecting white innocence and power. Concluding on a note of praxis, Dangerous Innocence argues that reattaching southern outsiders to a communal identity encourages an honest assessment about what whiteness represents and what it means to belong to a nation steeped in commitments to white supremacy.

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 stars born in the South build their national and international fan base by emphasizing the southern aspects of their biography and by leaning into regional clichés and stereotypes that percolate throughout the U.S. cultural imaginary. In turn, some southern stars trot out the region's hoariest tropes of fading belles, gullible country rubes, and the succors of southern hospitality only to reveal the shallowness of these stereotypes and of their celebrity personas as well. Covering more than one hundred years of cultural history, Southerners Acting Southern allows readers to gauge the South's often-reluctant progress into modernity, including discussions on the intersection of race and celebrity for the region's Black stars and its increasing, if hesitant, embrace of queer ones. Chapters feature a wide-ranging selection of southern celebrities, including Louis Armstrong, Truman Capote, Elvis Presley, Tennessee Williams, Andy Griffith, Tina Turner, Dolly Parton, Tom Petty, Gloria Estefan, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager, Ellen DeGeneres, Tyler Perry, Matthew McConaughey, Aziz Ansari, and Miley Cyrus. Southerners Acting Southern moves from past to present, from musicians to media personalities, discerning the ways in which southernness contributes to the building of personal celebrity. Altogether, this luminous work of cultural criticism reveals that southern stargazing, as much as it might initially appear a flighty pastime of overzealous fans, divulges deeper truths about the South, and the United States as a whole, that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

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 stars born in the South build their national and international fan base by emphasizing the southern aspects of their biography and by leaning into regional clichés and stereotypes that percolate throughout the U.S. cultural imaginary. In turn, some southern stars trot out the region's hoariest tropes of fading belles, gullible country rubes, and the succors of southern hospitality only to reveal the shallowness of these stereotypes and of their celebrity personas as well. Covering more than one hundred years of cultural history, Southerners Acting Southern allows readers to gauge the South's often-reluctant progress into modernity, including discussions on the intersection of race and celebrity for the region's Black stars and its increasing, if hesitant, embrace of queer ones. Chapters feature a wide-ranging selection of southern celebrities, including Louis Armstrong, Truman Capote, Elvis Presley, Tennessee Williams, Andy Griffith, Tina Turner, Dolly Parton, Tom Petty, Gloria Estefan, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager, Ellen DeGeneres, Tyler Perry, Matthew McConaughey, Aziz Ansari, and Miley Cyrus. Southerners Acting Southern moves from past to present, from musicians to media personalities, discerning the ways in which southernness contributes to the building of personal celebrity. Altogether, this luminous work of cultural criticism reveals that southern stargazing, as much as it might initially appear a flighty pastime of overzealous fans, divulges deeper truths about the South, and the United States as a whole, that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

The Bad Poor examines the rise of Grit Lit, a movement in contemporary southern literature written by and about poor southern whites. Examining issues of genre, race, and culture, Mitch Ploskonka traces the emergence of this iconoclastic mode through its major authors to reveal a literary-cultural identity rooted in difference, marked by resistance to respectability and class performance, and shaped by reckoning with the legacies of whiteness and regional memory. For those long dismissed as "white trash" and denied an active voice in their own representation, Grit Lit confronts the parallel concerns of finding a way to describe themselves and the means to communicate it appropriately. Beginning with Harry Crews and progressing chronologically to the present—including discussions of key works by Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, and Tom Franklin, among others—Ploskonka examines how Grit Lit authors forge self-representations by experimenting with genres and engaging with identity politics. Through the ongoing search for a usable, unshameful identity, Grit Lit enacts a painful but heartening narrative of grappling with the realities of people and place by acknowledging difference. As stories about the gritty or rough South proliferate across media, The Bad Poor relates an important story of literary self-fashioning by analyzing a body of literature that speaks to larger cultural discourses regarding racial identity, social justice, disability, and class divisions.

In Keywords for Southern Studies, editors Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson have compiled an eclectic collection of new essays that address the fluidity of southern studies by adopting a transnational, interdisciplinary focus. The essays are structured around critical terms pertinent both to the field and to modern life in general.The nonbinary, nontraditional approach of Keywords unmasks and refutes standard binary thinking—First World/Third World, self/other, for instance—that postcolonial studies revealed as a flawed rhetorical structure for analyzing empire. Instead, Keywords promotes a holistic way of thinking that begins with southern studies but extends beyond.

In Keywords for Southern Studies, editors Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson have compiled an eclectic collection of new essays that address the fluidity of southern studies by adopting a transnational, interdisciplinary focus. The essays are structured around critical terms pertinent both to the field and to modern life in general.The nonbinary, nontraditional approach of Keywords unmasks and refutes standard binary thinking—First World/Third World, self/other, for instance—that postcolonial studies revealed as a flawed rhetorical structure for analyzing empire. Instead, Keywords promotes a holistic way of thinking that begins with southern studies but extends beyond.

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 defense of slavery and evolved in its aftermath to continue to form a southern group whose “way of life” naturalized an emergent regime of segregation. Following the civil rights era, another set of mutations allowed the ostensible inclusion of groups heretofore excluded from the category “southerner,” mostly through the conceptualization of a “culture” projected backward into time. By attending closely to the historical formation and mutation of the things southerners have most often said that they are, we can better understand the dynamic and dialogic process of group formation in the U.S. South.