American Literary History

In each of the three teaching jobs I have been fortunate enough to hold in English departments, I have been hired as an early Americanist: to be more exact, as a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century US literature. "What would the department like me to teach in the fall?" I have asked as I prepared to start each of these jobs, and each time, the answer has been the same: "How about a course in twentieth-century southern literature?"

Initially it gave me whiplash, this mismatch between the area of scholarly need I was being hired to fill, and the first course I was asked to add to the departmental curriculum. By the third iteration of this pattern, I felt that my accumulating anecdotal experience was speaking to a structural incommensurateness, at least within research-focused, East Coast US English departments. Students wanted to read and think about "southern literature." Faculty did not consider "southern literature" to be a relevant or interesting (or perhaps even legitimate) subfield in which they'd want to hire a specialist. When I showed up—I was writing a book on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century US literature that had the word south in its title—it suddenly seemed possible for a department to accommodate the student interest without sacrificing a faculty line to it.

The student curiosity and the academic suspicion or distaste are perhaps two sides of the same coin, both engendered by the frankly damnable distinctions that the category "southern literature" has been invoked to demarcate. Each of the three literary histories under consideration in this review takes on and attempts to intervene in one of the most pungent epochs in the formation of the category "southern literature," as distinct from a broader US literature or literature in English. In Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820–1860 (2019), Katharine A. Burnett treats the decades leading to the Civil War, [End Page 573] when both contemporary readers and latter-day critics for the first time perceive some inkling of a "southern" sectionalist fiction, arising as a companion to Southern sectionalist politics—its "southernness" inhering in its core investment in promoting slavery as a positive good, for the US and for Western culture more broadly. In Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South (2019), Kathryn McKee engages the decades immediately following the Civil War, when a subfield of literature could be recognized as "Southern in type," as critic and author Albion Tourgée put it in 1888, to the extent that it was "distinctly Confederate in sympathy" (405). And in Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920–1941 (2017), Sarah Gardner productively revisits the modernist/interwar period, when "southern literature" became institutionalized as a publishing and marketing category: on the wrong side of Jim Crow, with the field of African American literature simultaneously in formation, its distinguishing feature became its production by white writers who were native to the former Confederate states.

Promoting slavery, lionizing the Confederacy, and policing the literary color line: these three stages in the definition of a distinct "southern literature" provide a master class (pun intended) in being on the wrong side of history. In this light, suspicion of the subfield by English departments seems reasonable. But what of the durable student interest in "southern literature" courses? Rather than imagining these students to be neo-Confederate curious, I see them as drawn by the strong association of the category "southern literature" with not simple exoticism but a perversity—a willful wrongness—that promises both entertainment and provocation. Several years ago, I heard Keith Cartwright describe the "southern literature" survey as "the Trojan horse course," and that characterization has stuck in my mind. Students might check...