The History of Southern Literature

Abstract

As its title proudly promises, The History of Southern Literature is an ambitious feat of American collective scholarship. In several senses of the term, it is indeed a monument. Imposing in size (626 pages) and scope, it sets out to record Southern writing and writers from 1588 to 1982, from Thomas Hariot's A Brief and True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia to Sylvia Wilkinson's Bone of My Bone. In addition to the seven expert editors, some forty other scholars and historians have contributed seventy-five chapters on literary periods, figures, and genres, as well as historical events and cultural movements. This four-pound monument to a tradition still significantly anchored in place and past was subsidized a private foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sponsored the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, it is issued by the leading scholarly publisher in the field of Southern history and (p. xiii). The project enjoyed the support services of librarians, computer experts, and typists from half a dozen Southern universities. On these and more intrinsic grounds, The History of Southern Literature claims an authority and cultural status no previous history or textbook of Southern writing earned for Louise Manly, W.P. Trent, Leonidas Warren Payne, or Jay B. Hubbell, whose 1954 study, The in American Literature: 1607-1900, is the immediate ancestor of this volume. Given these circumstances, one is encouraged not only to consult but to read this history both for what it says about Southern writing, past and present, and for what it represents as historical-cultural document, the expression of values and beliefs of an influential group of contemporary intellectuals. Consulting The History provides ample, generally reliable information, much pleasure, and some frustrations. The varied riches of this regional (and universal) literature are chronicled, often celebrated, and less often critically evaluated in a roughly chronological series of brief chapters. Even for the expert, new names and titles and unexpected connections pop up. Consulters and readers generally will know, and know how to judge discussions of, George Washington Harris and Joel Chandler Harris, but how many will as readily recognize Bernice Kelly Harris or Corra Harris? On broader topics and more major writers, too, there are nicely compressed chapters like Richard J. Calhoun's Literary Magazines in the Old South and Mary Ann Wimsatt's William Gilmore Simms. However, The History is not always as discriminating as it is en-