Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe

Abstract

Reviewed by: Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe Robert Jackson Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought. Edited by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 242. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6356-2; cloth, $95.00, 978-1-4696-6355-5.) There is a lot to like in this collection. The contributors are prominent scholars of southern history and literature who represent two generations of thoughtful, dedicated work. Many of the individual essays have particular strengths: Stephen Berry’s essay on Edgar Allan Poe is beautifully written and—rare in an academic piece of this sort—rather dramatic in the telling. Essays by John Grammer and Scott Romine on New Journalism and Reconstruction-era literary revisionism, respectively, are excellent models of the case-study method. Another highlight is Michael Kreyling’s essay, which contrasts the writ-erly approaches of Tony Judt and Michael O’Brien, a pair of eminent British-born historians who passed away in recent years (Judt in 2010, O’Brien in 2015). Kreyling examines their distinct methods on the way to lauding O’Brien’s Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (2 vols.; Chapel Hill, 2004) for its difficult balancing act between the rigors of an overarching interpretive frame and the frequently rebellious “subtleties of individuality” (p. 219). An eminent literary scholar himself, Kreyling takes the occasion to meditate on the challenges of reconciling the immensity of the past with the historian’s inescapable fate—“the process by which history becomes writing and inevitably writing becomes history” (p. 203). This is an apt conclusion to a volume whose debt to Michael O’Brien is significant. The editors dedicate the collection to O’Brien, and, indeed, a respectful invocation of O’Brien’s scholarship is a frequent, if not quite compulsory, gesture across the essays. The contributors are divided evenly between history and literature, and they speak to the two disciplines in overlapping ways that mirror much of O’Brien’s own methodology. Southern intellectual history here seems largely contained in these two disciplines; this is a rich, battle-tested interdisciplinary matrix, to be sure, but there does not seem to be much awareness of other disciplines—sociology, performing arts, religious studies, the pure and applied sciences, to name several in increasing scales of magnitude—and what they might contribute to this shared scholarly project. The vision of southern intellectual history that emerges in these pages instead relies most fundamentally on the worlds of print culture and publishing. Two essays, by Beth Barton Schweiger and Jonathan Daniel Wells, address book history. Others deal with individual authors and their publishing contexts: Berry on Poe’s tortured relationship to the reputation-imparting Charles Dickens; Timothy J. Williams on Edwin Wiley Fuller and his audience of Lost [End Page 131] Cause enthusiasts; Grammer on Willie Morris’s cultivation of the “Wrecking Crew,” a southern cohort at Harper’s Magazine at the end of the 1960s; and Romine on Edward A. Pollard’s almost comical search for authentic southern identities that would meet the needs of his imagined readership. “The constant in Pollard’s writing,” Romine concludes wryly, “is a conception of ‘all true southerners,’ even if the true southerner in question never survived the next publication cycle” (p. 176). Indeed, even Michael T. Bernath’s essay on the complex situation of northerners who worked as schoolteachers in the South near the beginning of the Civil War, and whose mere presence frequently whipped up violent conflicts based more on local class antagonism than regional or racial identification, emphasizes this point. Bernath characterizes such figures as “public intellectuals” (although his discussion of their actual thoughts and ideas is minimal); and he concludes that the contest of ideas that played out in local newspapers in response to their presence “shows the central role that print played in antebellum southern life” (pp. 49–50). Another remarkable aspect of this volume is the almost complete absence of Black or other nonwhite subjects. Many, perhaps most, of the essays address slavery, segregation, and racism itself...