The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs (review)

More than thirty years ago, John Shelton Reed (a Tennessean) marveled at the persistence of a southern subculture within the very nation that had given the world the concept of mass society. It is only fitting that Reed should be one of the 265 contributors to this meticulously edited new compilation that gives weighty validation to the continuance of southern identity. In his essay on the sociology of the South in The Companion to Southern Literature, Reed points out that the first two American books to include the word sociology in their titles were written by antebellum southerners. Both books were defenses of slavery, the region's most defining institution, which would lead the Old South to military ruin and cultural collapse.

But the South kept going after the failure of the Confederacy, reimagining itself many times, sometimes resisting change, but also reducing its social and economic problems and improving dramatically the life of its inhabitants. The literary record of the South during this long history that began in the tobacco patches of tidewater Virginia is the huge subject of The Companion to Southern Literature. This indispensable reference book includes more than five hundred alphabetical entries from Abolition to Yoknapatawpha. Contributing these signed essays are mainly academics (including me), representing a wide range of American universities and colleges. But contributors also include writers and poets, independent scholars, and graduate students. It is a vast undertaking, expertly handled by the editors, who are owed a lasting debt by those of us who will come to this book time and again, for years ahead.

The Companion to Southern Literature is an updated and greatly expanded extension to the literature section of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris. In their introduction to the Companion, Flora and MacKethan acknowledge their debt to these compilers and also hail three scholars, "giants whose decades of engagement have been of supreme benefit to all who have followed: C. Vann Woodward, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Lewis P. Simpson" (xxi). The book is dedicated to Robert A. Bain, a scholar of southern literature who taught scores of graduate students (again, including me) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A wide range of critical approaches is represented in the Companion to Southern Literature, with entries on Postmodernism, Gay and Lesbian Literature, and the Proletarian Novel as well as on The Fugitives and New Criticism. Although this book is not intended as a biographical guide, twelve major southern authors are cited in the table of contents, among them Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams. Thirty or so additional entries ranging from William Shakespeare to Elvis Presley are included, figures whose works or lives have influenced southern writing. Southern literature is approached variously by period, genre, cultural subject, movement, and style. Such is their depth, some essays approach monograph length.

Readers will appreciate the heavy emphasis on southern history. From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, from Nullification to the New Deal, numerous events and movements are treated in substantive essays, complete with suggestions for further reading. Similarly, individual southerners from Thomas Jefferson to Huey Long are discussed for their impact on the literary tradition. Not everyone would guess, for example, that more serious American novelists wrote disguised historical novels about the Kingfish than any other U.S. politician of the twentieth century.

Like history, religion is treated extensively. Essays appear on all major denominations of Christianity as well as on the southern Jewish tradition. Snake Handling, Fundamentalism, Televangelists, and Secularization appear as topics. So do African American Folk Culture, Voodoo, Gospel Music, Cemeteries and Graveyards, Magic Realism, the Trickster, the Grotesque, and the Bible Belt—among many others.

A highly useful feature of the Companion is its separate coverage of the state literatures of the South. These...