Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South ed. by Jason Phillips (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2014 93 he dismisses reports of the KGC’s existence, confessions of KGC membership, and other evidence of its activities in northern states. He ignores statements made by government spies and secret society members alike that the organization morphed into successor secret societies such as the Order of American Knights and the Sons of Liberty that plotted violence to aid the Confederate cause. Keehn’s study is weakened as well by his frequent resort to words such as “likely,” “presumably,” and “undoubtedly,” which suggest that the author possesses less than rock-solid evidence. Still, secret criminal organizations are elusive animals and typically fail to leave extensive archival paper trails. Keehn should be commended for finding so much evidence about the KGC’s activities, in the process revealing how formidable the organization was in the South. Stephen E. Towne Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Jason Phillips, ed. Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. 240 pp. ISBN: 9780807150344 (cloth), $48.00. Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South Jason Phillips, ed. Thenineessayswithinthisvolumearelinked, according to editor Jason Phillips, by their challenges to “master narratives,” what Phillips deems “stories masquerading as knowledge or truth that promote the interests of white patriarchy past and present” (2). With topics spanning two hundred years and ranging from the 1792 attempted poisoning of Virginia Baptist minister James Ireland to an analysis of white trash autobiographies from authors Harry Crews and Dorothy Allison, it seems logical to connect the varied approaches with such a broad term. Phillips provides a carefully crafted introduction, without which one might find the connective theme rather elusive. He begins the introduction with an episode representative of the volume’s goals: during “The Uses of History in Fiction,” a panel discussion at the 1968 Southern Historical Association conference, Ralph Ellison deemed those present (including William Styron, Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, and other notable figures in the field) to be “respectable liars.” Fiction writers had, Ellison argued, done far more than historians in terms of undermining BOOK REVIEWS 94 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY the lingering myths and master narratives that privileged white perspective in the perception— both scholarly and otherwise—of southern history and culture. Just as this episode encapsulates the interdisciplinary dialogue at least partly responsible for the historiographical shift away from privileging white, patriarchal narratives over other voices in the historical record, so this collection serves as a representative sample of the continued advantages of such interdisciplinary, inter-textual dialogue. According to Phillips, the scholars featured in this collection (six historians and three literary scholars) seek to dispel binaries as they “cross boundaries, question dichotomies, and experiment with the form, not merely the content of scholarship” (3). The approaches to southern history and literature within this volume vary as widely as their subject matter. Some, like Farrell O’Gorman’s “Rewriting American Borders: The Southern Gothic, Religion, and U.S. Historical Narrative,” employ careful intertextual analysis (in this case, selected novels are examined as a means of demonstrating changing perceptions of the exotic, foreign “other” as it appears in contrast to notions of southern identity in historical and literary narratives) to challenge established literary and historical traditions . Others, like Orville Vernon Burton and Ian Binnington’s “‘And Bid Him Bear a Patriot’s Part’: National and Local Perspectives on Confederate Nationalism,” use a very narrow period of time (in this case, two years) in an individual’s life to understand better the complexities of a particular historical moment. Phillips suggests this diverse collection be considered in two groups: the first four essays examine what he describes as “the liminal zone between literature and history, the place where master narratives have been constructed and contested for centuries ” (5). Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s “Will Percy and Lanterns on the Levee Revisited” provides a fitting introduction to this section (and to the collection as a whole) as it seamlessly connects disciplines in an examination of the complex relationship between individual identity, literary conventions , and the residual pressures of white southern culture. In this regard, the essay—perhaps the epitome of what can be accomplished through interdisciplinary approaches—could just as easily have appeared in the second section...