Becoming Southern Writers: Essays in Honor of Charles Joyner ed. by Orville Vernon Burton and Eldred E. Prince Jr (review)

This volume of interesting if eclectic essays collects papers and presentations at a conference hosted by Coastal Carolina University in 2011 to honor the work and life of the celebrated southern scholar Charles Joyner, who had retired in 2007. He was the longtime Burroughs Chair in Southern History and Culture and director of the university's Waccamaw Center for Cultural and Historical Studies; author of the classic study Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, 1984), as well as three other books, several edited volumes, and nearly one hundred other published works (excluding book reviews); and former president of the Southern Historical Association (2005). Joyner also had the unusual distinction of earning two doctoral degrees, the first in history from the University of South Carolina and the second in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps as significant, as Orville Vernon Burton and Eldred E. Prince Jr. note in their introduction, "Chaz" Joyner was widely known throughout his long career as "the nicest and most decent person … [who] probably has more friends in the history profession than anyone" (p. 8).

The twenty-nine contributors are all, in the words of David Hackett Fischer, "a Friend of Chaz" (p. 78). As Fischer notes, the conference invitees were asked to honor Joyner by "reflect[ing] on their own lives, and their experience of writing about the South" (p. 78). These essays, of course, are generous in their praise of Joyner as a scholar, colleague, and mentor in the shared imaginary of the "republic of southern history" over the past half century. But one also senses a shared appreciation of their generation's intellectual and personal struggles in becoming southern writers, a sense suggested by the autobiographical (if never merely sentimental) tack of most of these essays. These self-described southern writers, though mostly a Who's Who of senior professional southern historians (including coeditor Orville Vernon Burton, Dan Carter, Walter B. Edgar, William W. Freehling, John C. Inscoe, Daniel C. Littlefield, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown), also include historically minded creative writers (the poet Natasha Trethewey, the novelist Josephine Humphreys), folklorists (William Ferris, Dale Rosengarten, Theodore Rosengarten, and Anne M. Wyatt-Brown), and noted journalists. Joyner's wide intellectual interests are reflected in these often highly personal and indeed quite revealing essays, and not only his interests in southern history and folklore but also in literature, music, politics, religion, social change, and much else. All contributions are leavened by a profoundly optimistic humanism in the face of the lived realities of the U.S. South, of its tragedies and tribulations and triumphs, then and now. One also notes how bumpy, or at least peripatetic, their initial professional paths were, mirroring Joyner's own early academic journey before he returned to Coastal Carolina in 1988.

The best of these essays honor Joyner by explicitly telling of their authors' own personal journeys, finding narrative meaning in the twists and turns of their professional and writerly paths; and indeed the individual stories of how they came to their writing about the South, and in several cases of how they persisted, are all quite becoming.

The contributions are organized alphabetically by author's last name, except for the "photographic homage" by William Ferris, which closes the volume (p. 253). Essays are generally brief, ranging from three to twenty-one pages in length (excluding notes). The introduction provides an anecdotal biographical summary of Joyner's life and a brief assessment of his historiographical influences, namely, his interdisciplinary humanism and his "quiet insistence that major historical issues can be profitably examined from focusing tightly on the activities of people in small places," as well as succinct summaries of each contribution (p. 7). Eleven of the essays begin with a direct personal reference to Joyner. Ten (those by Jack Bass, Burton...