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.

ContributorsIntroductionPART I: CONTACT TO THE CIVIL WAR1. Literary and Textual Histories of the Native South. Eric Gary Anderson2. Before Hypodescent: Whitening Equations in South America and the American South. Ruth Hill3. The Dying Confession of Joseph Hare (1818): Transatlantic Highwaymen and Southern Outlaws in the Antebellum South. Thomas Ruys Smith4. Jackson's Villes, Squares, & Frontiers of Democracy. Keith Cartwright5. Locality and the Serial South. Lloyd Pratt6. The Long Shadow of Torture in the American South. W. Fitzhugh Brundage7. Masculine Sentiment, Racial Fetishism, and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum Southern Literature. Michael P. BiblerPART II: THE CIVIL WAR AND BEYOND8. Southern Affects: Field and Feeling in a Skeptical Age. Scott Romine9. Not So Still Waters: Travelers to Florida and the Tropical Sublime. John W. Lowe10. Indian Knives and Color Lines: Mark Twain from Hannibal to the Jim Crow Raj. Harilaos Stecopoulos11. Narrative and Counternarrative in The Leopard's Spots and The Marrow of Tradition. Anthony Wilson12. The Bright Side: African American Women and the Affective Archive of Southern Racial Uplift. Stephen KnadlerPART III: SOUTHERN MODERNISMS13. " Proffered for your perusal in ring by concentric ring": The South and the World in William Faulkner's Fiction. Owen Robinson14. Richard Weaver, Lillian Smith, the South, and the World. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.15. Arts of Abjection in James Agee, Walker Evans, and Luis Bunuel. Leigh Anne Duck16. Tennessee Williams and the Burden of Southern Sexuality Studies. Gary Richards17. Reimagining the South of Richard Wright: The Anti-Protest Writing of Albert Murray, Raymond Andrews, and Ernest Gaines. James W..Coleman18. Letter-Writing, Authorship, and Southern Women Modernists. Will BrantleyPART IV: AFTER SOUTHERN MODERNISMS: WRITING IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND CONTEMPORARY SOUTH19. Nature and Spirituality in Contemporary Appalachian Poetry. John Lang20. Southern Religion's Sexual Charge and the National Imagination. Katherine Henninger21. Their Confederate Kinfolk: African Americans' Interracial Family Histories. Suzanne W. Jones22. Mourning, Mockery, and the Post-South: Lars von Trier's Manderlay and Geraldine Brooks's March.. Michael Kreyling23. Made Things: Structuring Modernity in Southern Poetry. Daniel Cross Turner24. Four Contemporary Latina/o Writers Ghost the U.S. South. Maria DeGuzman25. You Don't Have to Be Born There: Immigration and Contemporary Fiction of the U. S.. South. Martyn Bone26. Asian Americans, Racial Latency, Southern Traces. Leslie Bow27. The Woundedness of Southern Literature, Looking Away. Minrose Gwin