Literature

Offering a comprehensive view of the South's literary landscape, past and present, this volume celebrates the region's ever-flourishing literary culture and recognizes the ongoing evolution of the southern literary canon.
Greatly expanding the content of the literature section in the original "Encyclopedia," this volume includes 31 thematic essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical categories, such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and agrarianism; and themes in southern writing, such as food, religion, and sexuality. Most striking is the fivefold increase in the number of biographical entries, which introduce southern novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. Special attention is given to contemporary writers and other individuals who have not been widely covered in previous scholarship.