Offering a comprehensive view of the South's literary landscape,
past and present, this volume of
The New Encyclopedia of
Southern Culture celebrates the region's ever-flourishing
literary culture and recognizes the ongoing evolution of the
southern literary canon. As new writers draw upon and reshape
previous traditions, southern literature has broadened and deepened
its connections not just to the American literary mainstream but
also to world literatures--a development thoughtfully explored in
the essays here.
Greatly expanding the content of the literature section in the
original
Encyclopedia, this volume includes 31 thematic
essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical
categories, such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and
agrarianism; and themes in southern writing, such as food,
religion, and sexuality. Most striking is the fivefold increase in
the number of biographical entries, which introduce southern
novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. Special attention is
given to contemporary writers and other individuals who have not
been widely covered in previous scholarship.