“This is a book for beginners and for seasoned veterans of southern literary study,” Noel Polk writes in his blurb for Richard Gray's latest book. Indeed, the volume does nothing less than reframe the southern literary canon in highly acecessible prose and engaging readings. Central to Gray's argument is that the United States South is an imagined community made up of imagined communities and that its construction owes much to its intertextual interactions with global, especially translatlantic, discourses. The book proceeds in three chapters. In the first, Gray revisits C. Vann Woodward's notion of the “experience of defeat” as a defining aspect of the South but adds an interesting twist by asserting that such an experience both precedes and continues beyond the context of the Civil War in Native experiences of defeat and in the southern conceptualizations of Vietnam conflict, respectively. Chapter 2 explores the pastoral and anti-pastoral strains in southern writing, showing how early modern English writings championing myths of agrarian lifestyles informed pastoral writing in the South long before the Nashville Agrarians, while also examining slave narratives as anti-pastoral writings and discussing the ways Wendell Berry engages both traditions. The final chapter advances a reading of influence as being not so much a matter of anxiety as a community-building and -affirming force by examining writers who have experienced varying types of southern influence: where the Mississippian Eudora Welty's very southern novel The Robber Bridegroom is strongly influenced by Grimm brothers' fairy tales, the Ohioan Toni Morrison's Beloved is deeply invested in southern experience, while Vietnamese immigrants try to reimagine their homeland through recognition of similarities between certain aspects of the geography and history of the South and those of their homeland in such texts as Christine Bell's The Perez Family and Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge.

Gray's book thus moves through a multiplicity of both familiar and obscure texts to reenvisioning southern literature as non-monolithic. One learns a lot reading this book, discovering works written both before and after the construction of the accepted body of southern literature. It might be objected that Gray's thesis in its essence lacks freshness not only in its evocation of the culture of defeat but also in its privileging of discourse, for while he brings new writings into consideration, he still places them in the context of accepted southern dynamics – it is a bothersome fact that the final words of the book are a quote from Faulkner, whom Gray describes as “the greatest of all southern writers, so far” (244). In fact, the book illustrates the difficulty of pushing forward with reorganizing and expanding the canon of southern literature: how can the South be reenvisioned to accommodate voices entirely unaffected by the Confederacy while avoiding propagating merely a new phase of literary white aristocratic colonization? Though problems persist in such an endeavor, this book offers a step toward such a reenvisioning, and for that reason it is very important.