From the popular legend of Pocahontas to the Civil War soap opera Gone with the Wind to countless sculpted heads of George Washington that adorn homes and museums, whole industries have emerged to feed America's addiction to imaginary histories that cover up the often violent acts of building a homogeneous nation. In Ersatz America, Rebecca Mark shows how this four-hundred-year-old obsession with false history has wounded democracy by creating a language that is severed from material reality. Without the mediating touchstones of body and nature, creative representations of our history have been allowed to spin into dangerous abstraction.

Other scholars have addressed the artificial qualities of the collective American memory, but what distinguishes "Ersatz America" is that it does more than simply deconstruct--it provides a map for regeneration. Mark contends that throughout American history, citizen/artists have responded to the deadly memorialization of the past with artistic expressions and visual artifacts that exist outside the realm of official language, creating a counter narrative. These examples of what she calls visceral graphism are embodied in and connected to the human experience of indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and silenced women, giving form to the unspeakable. We must learn, Mark suggests, to read the markings of these works against the iconic national myths. In doing so, we can shift from being mesmerized by the monumentalism of this national mirage to embracing the regeneration and recovery of our human history.

"This well could be the most important book yet published on Eudora Welty," says noted Welty scholar Noel Polk. "It offers a revolutionary and convincing reading of Welty's "The Golden Apples" (1949), but its implications for the study of Welty as a writer go far and beyond its interpretation of this single text." Until the recent explosion of feminist critical interest in her work, Welty criticism was dominated by the narrow and singular perspective of her as a "white southern lady" writing first-rate "regional fiction." Today her work is being closely re-examined for its innovations and artistry. In this revolutionary new way of studying Welty, Rebecca Mark and other contemporary critics have focused not upon Welty's southern qualities but upon her total engagement with literary modernism. Rebecca Mark's study proposes feminist intertextuality as a reading strategy for a critical study of Welty. Here Mark directly attacks the problem of literary influence which for decades has intrigued critics of "The Golden Apples." Many have focused on its mythical dimensions. Instead Mark finds allusions that are far more pervasive. These she sees to be a direct challenge to the dominant cultural voices of literary tradition. She argues that Welty's text refutes the apocalypse and despair that are hallmarks in the literary modernism formulated by Joyce and by Faulkner. She shows indeed that Welty's text confronts one of the mainstays of western literary tradition--the dominance and centrality of the indomitable hero. She argues that the expansive intertextuality in Welty reveals a communal, resonant, metaphoric narrative that transforms such masculine elements of rape, domination, and victimization of the feminine into narratives of engagement, battle, confrontation, fertility, and sexual exchange between the masculine and the feminine. Mark's reading shows how Welty has responded not just to literary texts but also to literary texts but also to cultural forces in creating her memorable stories. Because Welty has given voice to a range of silenced people--African Americans, women, old people, and children--Mark says rightly that Welty's gift lies in the extraordinary melding of her diverse knowledge of literature, of history, and of immediate locale.

Faced with Eudora Welty's preference for the oblique in literary performances, some have assumed that Welty was not concerned with issues of race, or even that she was perhaps ambivalent toward racism. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines Welty's handling of race, the color line, and Jim Crow segregation and sheds new light on her views about the patterns, insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness. Contributors to this volume show that Welty addressed whiteness and race in her earliest stories, her photography, and her first novel, Delta Wedding. In subsequent work, including The Golden Apples, The Optimist's Daughter, and her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, she made the color line and white privilege visible, revealing the gaping distances between lives lived in shared space but separated by social hierarchy and segregation. Even when black characters hover in the margins of her fiction, they point readers toward complex lives, and the black body is itself full of meaning in her work. Several essays suggest that Welty represented race, like gender and power, as a performance scripted by whiteness. Her black characters in particular recognize whiteface and blackface as performances, especially comical when white characters are unaware of their role play. Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race also makes clear that Welty recognized white material advantage and black economic deprivation as part of a cycle of race and poverty in America and that she connected this history to lives on either side of the color line, to relationships across it, and to an uneasy hierarchy of white classes within the presumed monolith of whiteness. Contributors: Mae Miller Claxton, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Sarah Ford, Jean C. Griffith, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Harriet Pollack, Keri Watson, Patricia Yaeger.

From the popular legend of Pocahontas to the Civil War soap opera Gone with the Wind to countless sculpted heads of George Washington that adorn homes and museums, whole industries have emerged to feed America's addiction to imaginary histories that cover up the often violent acts of building a homogeneous nation. In Ersatz America, Rebecca Mark shows how this four-hundred-year-old obsession with false history has wounded democracy by creating a language that is severed from material reality. Without the mediating touchstones of body and nature, creative representations of our history have been allowed to spin into dangerous abstraction.

Other scholars have addressed the artificial qualities of the collective American memory, but what distinguishes "Ersatz America" is that it does more than simply deconstruct--it provides a map for regeneration. Mark contends that throughout American history, citizen/artists have responded to the deadly memorialization of the past with artistic expressions and visual artifacts that exist outside the realm of official language, creating a counter narrative. These examples of what she calls visceral graphism are embodied in and connected to the human experience of indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and silenced women, giving form to the unspeakable. We must learn, Mark suggests, to read the markings of these works against the iconic national myths. In doing so, we can shift from being mesmerized by the monumentalism of this national mirage to embracing the regeneration and recovery of our human history.

Notions of southern culture run deep and wide through the American consciousness. Perhaps no region of the United States conjures up as many images or emotions as does the American South. Yet despite the stereotypes that resonate throughout society, it remains nearly impossible to categorize the many shades of culture found in the history of the southern states. Spanning from Atlantic coastal ecosystems to the Ozark Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico, the region is home to orange groves and Creole food; the Gothic Revival style and the New Urbanism movement; ragtime, Piedmont blues, and Appalachian folk songs; high school football battles and Tobacco Road basketball rivalries; the Cajun language, the Gullah tongue, and the famous Southern drawl. From sartorial fashions to William Faulkner's Sartoris, this splendid volume documents southern culture in its many colors and forms.

"The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures" is the first rigorous reference collection on the many ways in which American identity has been defined by its regions and its people. Each of its eight regional volumes presents thoroughly researched narrative chapters on Architecture; Art; Ecology & Environment; Ethnicity; Fashion; Film & Theater; Folklore; Food; Language; Literature; Music; Religion; and Sports & Recreation. Each book also includes a volume-specific introduction, as well as a series foreword by noted regional scholar and former National Endowment for the Humanities chairman William Ferris, who served as Consulting Editor for this encyclopedia.