Mold on the Cornbread: The Spore Paradigm of Southern Studies

Abstract

Recently, scholars have questioned the need for southern literary studies. Why have a separate field when so much scholarship in the past decade has sought to break down the southern isolationism that characterized studies of the South for most of the twentieth century? Global South studies and the new southern studies have shaped the field and pushed it in this direction, while transatlantic, transpacific, and even planetary studies are part of the academic vernacular.