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BOOK REVIEW The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 9: Literature. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. pp. xiii-536. Hardcover: $55.00; paperback: $28.99, digital: $9.99. IT HAS BEEN OVER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS SINCE THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE Encyclopedia of Southern Culture was published as a collaboration between the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the University of North Carolina Press. Even as the Encyclopedia was receiving its first great critical and popular acclaim, the contributors and editors knew they had only touched the surface of the rich, deep, and varied sources of “Southern Culture,” as new historians,anthropologists,sociologists,journalists,creativewriters,and others continued to expand the margins and boundaries of what it meant to be “Southern.” The original mission of the Encyclopedia was to approach the South as a cultural entity including “a full range of social indicators, trait groupings, literary concepts, and historical evidence” which made Southern culture both “unique” and with “internal diversity” (xiii). In addition, the original editors and contributors were not seeking to satisfy anyone who expected the initial edition to be the complete and final word on what defined Southern culture, but more of an introduction to the multiple facets of an ever growing and changing culturewithdistinctcharacteristicsandactivecontemporaryfigures.The New Encyclopedia holds to the original mission of the first edition, but thesheervolumeofinformationnowavailableon“Southernculture”has made it sensible and necessary for the editors to divide the material into twenty-four separate volumes covering categories including Race, History, Recreation, Agriculture and Industry, Science and Medicine, Music, and this volume on Literature, among others. Although these volumes will never exhaust the available material, and surely new volumes and new editions will follow, the achievement of the editors and the contributors is monumental, and provides as close to a contextual and comprehensive overview both of a “place” and the “idea” of a place than could any other single collection of scholarship. As for Volume 9: Literature, even as a stand-alone volume, the value to scholars, students, and the general reading public is immense. It has some quirks in its arrangement, but they enhance rather than injure its 534 Mississippi Quarterly usefulness. What might seem to be an eccentric division of the material actually makes a great deal of sense to someone who is using the book as a way to add either to general or to specific knowledge. The alphabetical encyclopedic entries on individual authors do not begin until page 163 with “Agee, James” and end on page 480 with “Young, Thomas Daniel.” Over a third of the book is made up of essays and indexes, but barring any shocking number of missing major writers, and I do not believe many are omitted, the editors have created what is nearly an ideal balance between genre (or category) and individual. Editor M. Thomas Inge’s introductory essay focuses mainly on what have been considered the traditional periods, names, and genres in Southern literature, although it is updated to include commentary on more contemporary writers, including an interesting serious analysis of the usefulness of the popular culture label “grit lit.” His broad overview is learned and comprehensive, but perhaps dismisses too quickly less traditional writers who have a “lack of artistic discipline” in order to praise more favored ones who exhibit “impeccable style.” But following this overview, there are thirty separate sub-topical alphabetized essays which are extremely valuable in illuminating the richly layered and interconnectedgenealogiesofSouthernliterature.Theessaysoffertopics that are in no way mutually exclusive: for example, the first essay is “African American Literature” and there is also one on “Civil Rights in Literature,” but all of them are crafted to provide context and connection among multitudes of authors and genres and periods. From “Food in Literature” to “Nature Writing and Writers” to “Southern Gothic,” both the browser and the close reader will be steered from the essays toward examining the entries on individual authors which make up the next section of the book. The entries on the authors themselves are not designed to be exhaustive or to emphasize one writer’s artistic superiority over others; this approach is refreshing. The 1989 encyclopedia’s...

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