This tradition is not without irony, given the other directive that has long governed southern literary study: the emphasis on promoting "internal" or a-historical, non-contingent readings of texts. An overview of southern literature based on a selection of key genres departs substantially from the program of traditional literary histories, which rely upon relatively static, periodic, historical reference points to arrange and provide nomenclatures for southern literature. ![]() Yet, the South can be said to have its own literary genres - its particular sets of forms or organizing motifs - as much as it has a history and manners. To some, genres are universal categories that describe formal literary conventions, not geo-social preoccupations. In defining a text's " southernness," the matter of its genre might not seem a touchstone of much value. " Southern literature" announces the conjunction of the US South and an expressive art - texts identified as belonging to a particular history, social organization, and cultural imaginary. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA-3.0. ![]() Courtesy of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. ![]() This essay considers southern literature in terms of generic forms that are, if not uniquely southern, substantially recognizable as contingent upon southern identifiers: geographic, social, cultural, as well as historical and linguistic contingencies that constitute "the South." Introduction Booklover's Map of the United States, 1949.
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