Literature - Paperback

by M. Thomas Inge (Editor), Charles Reagan Wilson (Editor)

Offering a comprehensive view of the South's literary landscape, past and present, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture celebrates the region's ever-flourishing literary culture and recognizes the ongoing evolution of the southern literary canon. As new writers draw upon and reshape previous traditions, southern literature has broadened and deepened its connections not just to the American literary mainstream but also to world literatures -- a development thoughtfully explored in the essays here.

Greatly expanding the content of the literature section in the original Encyclopedia, this volume includes 31 thematic essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical categories, such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and agrarianism; and themes in southern writing, such as food, religion, and sexuality. Most striking is the fivefold increase in the number of biographical entries, which introduce southern novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. Special attention is given to contemporary writers and other individuals who have not been widely covered in previous scholarship.

Author Biography

M. Thomas Inge is Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of Humanities at Randolph-Macon College. He is author or editor of numerous books, including William Faulkner and the four-volume Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture. Charles Reagan Wilson is Kelly Gene Cook Sr. Chair in History and Professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is coeditor, with William Ferris, of the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.