Despite hailing and frequently setting his fiction on Eastern Shore of Maryland--a region whose history includes slavery, plantation agriculture, widespread support for Confederate cause during Civil War, and de jure racial segregation into 1960s--John Barth is rarely considered southern writer. His fiction displays little interest in what were once considered orthodox preoccupations of southern renascence, such as, in Cleanth Brooks's words, the pervading sense of community, the sense of religious wholeness, or a sense of tragic dimension of life, all of which were held to exist more robustly in rural societies (217). (1) Nor is Barth much given to railing against industrialization or abstractions of life under finance capitalism. His work does not dwell on racial matters, representing neither worst horrors of southern racism nor quests for freedom and collective redemption that they have provoked. His sensibility is primarily comic, his fiction largely free of tragic and gothic monumentalism, and his public persona that of nice guy who likes to write, wants readers to like his work, and smiles bemusedly when accused of lack of gravitas. On few occasions when critics have considered Barth's possible southernness, they have done so under rubric of for as Martyn Bone observes, It is truth universally acknowledged among Southern literary scholars that 'the South' and 'southern literature' have been characterized by 'sense of place.' (vii). This phrase, evoking both what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls production of presence (xiii--xiv) and dense historical resonance, still serves in quarters as shorthand for southern authenticity, and critics who apply it to Barth ask whether his work possesses it sufficiently, usually answering in negative. Lewis A. Lawson, for instance, in brief entry on Barth in History of Southern Literature, opines that Barth's early work still shows some regard for ability of to particularize an existence, so that hot, dense flattened-out land/sea scape of Maryland's Eastern Shore is not merely employed as background or as reflection of mood, but is factor that circumscribes. ... In time, though, Lawson continues, place simply becomes trifle, like Muzak in dentist's office--an external which bores, but in no other way impinges upon consciousness (517). Even Barth's re-creation of Maryland's colonial history in Sot-Weed Factor (1960) proceeds not a close attention to landmark or artifact but from culture, talk and culminates in (heretical) sense that all values are relative. John M. Bradbury, writing in 1969, goes further and castigates both Barth and Walker Percy for betraying southern literary heritage, presenting modern South, which is no longer cultural entity (321) but tragicomic absurdity (329). Barth, for his part, has provoked such critique through his repeated assertions that social history, politics, and ethics have no claim on his fictive practice. Muse, spare me (at desk, I mean) social-historical responsibility, and in last analysis every other kind as well, except artistic, he wrote in 1965 (Muse 55). (2) Fourteen years later, he would assert simultaneously humanist faith in timelessness and placelessness of great literature and an aesthete's belief in its essential self-reflexivity: The literature that finally matters in any is almost never principally about that culture but rather about the passions of human breast ... possibilities of human language ... [and] almost always also about itself (Historical Fiction 190, 191; Barth's italics). former statement anticipates John Gardner's notorious attack on Barth in On Moral Fiction; latter one invites critique left for its ahistoricality and its naive or irresponsible politics.(3) And both statements stand in contrast to prescriptive conservatism, committed both to artistic moral responsibility and to centrality of place, that informs judgments of Lawson and Bradbury. …