The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South-global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South-that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.

Over the past generation the Deep South has become the primary focus, and the plantation the predominant site, in southern literary studies. These developments followed academic interest first in postcolonial studies and more recently in globalization studies and conceptions of the Global South. With The North of the South Barbara Ladd turns her attention to the Upper South, exploring the fluidity of regional boundaries in this part of the world. In so doing she argues for greater attention to the impact of its distinctive ecosystems on its literature and points out the complex ways the Upper South's cultural and natural histories are foundational for our national imaginary. Surprisingly, it is Edgar Allan Poe who anchors this study. No longer American literary nationalism's most famous misfit, here he is shown to be remarkably attentive to both the natural and the nationalizing world around him, to have engaged deeply and critically with the environmental and the nationalist vision of Thomas Jefferson. Poe left a legacy of national melancholy around questions of American origins and possible futures discernible in the Souths of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison. In her examination of these cultural aspects of the Upper South, Ladd plumbs the depths of Poe's influence on southern literary studies.

Over the past generation the Deep South has become the primary focus, and the plantation the predominant site, in southern literary studies. These developments followed academic interest first in postcolonial studies and more recently in globalization studies and conceptions of the Global South. With The North of the South Barbara Ladd turns her attention to the Upper South, exploring the fluidity of regional boundaries in this part of the world. In so doing she argues for greater attention to the impact of its distinctive ecosystems on its literature and points out the complex ways the Upper South's cultural and natural histories are foundational for our national imaginary. Surprisingly, it is Edgar Allan Poe who anchors this study. No longer American literary nationalism's most famous misfit, here he is shown to be remarkably attentive to both the natural and the nationalizing world around him, to have engaged deeply and critically with the environmental and the nationalist vision of Thomas Jefferson. Poe left a legacy of national melancholy around questions of American origins and possible futures discernible in the Souths of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison. In her examination of these cultural aspects of the Upper South, Ladd plumbs the depths of Poe's influence on southern literary studies.

In a major reinterpretation, Resisting History reveals that women, as subjects of writing and as writing subjects themselves, played a far more important role in shaping the landscape of modernism than has been previously acknowledged. Here Barbara Ladd offers powerful new readings of three southern writers who reimagined authorship between World War I and the mid-1950s.

Ladd argues that the idea of a "new woman" -- released from some of the traditional constraints of family and community, more mobile, and participating in new contractual forms of relationality -- precipitated a highly productive authorial crisis of gender in William Faulkner. As "new women" themselves, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty explored the territory of the authorial sublime and claimed, for themselves and other women, new forms of cultural agency. Together, these writers expose a territory of female suffering and aspiration that has been largely ignored in literary histories.

In opposition to the belief that women's lives, and dreams, are bound up in ideas of community and pre-contractual forms of relationality, Ladd demonstrates that all three writers -- Faulkner in As I Lay Dying, Welty in selected short stories and in The Golden Apples, and Hurston in Tell My Horse -- place women in territories where community is threatened or nonexistent and new opportunities for self-definition can be seized. And in A Fable, Faulkner undertakes a related project in his exploration of gender and history in an era of world war, focusing on men, mourning, and resistance and on the insurgences of the "masses" -- the feminized "others" of history -- in order to rethink authorship and resistance for a totalitarian age.

Filled with insights and written with obvious passion for the subject, Resisting History challenges received ideas about history as a coherent narrative and about the development of U.S. modernism and points the way to new histories of literary and cultural modernisms in which the work of women shares center stage with the work of men.

Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner is a strikingly original study of works by three postbellum novelists with strong ties to the Deep South and Mississippi Valley. In it, Barbara Ladd argues that writers like Cable, Twain, and Faulkner cannot be read exclusively within the context of a nationalistically defined "American" literature, but must also be understood in light of the cultural legacy that French and Spanish colonialism bestowed on the Deep South and the Mississippi River Valley, specifically with respect to the very different ways these colonialist cultures conceptualized race, color, and nationality.

Ladd probes the work of these writers for discontinuities, for moments of narrative incoherence, from which she charts the ideological winds that blew through the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Cable's The Grandissimes, written at the beginning of the Redemption era, the discontinuities are strategic whispers to the reader about the reality of racial division and violence that lay beneath the white reconciliation romance. Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins also inscribes racial discord, although with the added dimension of experimentation with form. And in Absalom, Absalom and Light in August, narrative incoherence becomes central as Faulkner explores the impact of radical racism on the ways that whiteness was constructed in the early twentieth century. Neither "race" nor "nation," Ladd shows, is stable in the work of these writers, but is always contested and shifting.

Ladd's book raises provocative questions about the relationships between race, region, and nationalism in literary study. With its innovative approach and rich New Historicist method, it is an important contribution to scholarship in several fields.