In his new book, David Davis takes up an enduring question in southern literary studies: how do we get from the early twentieth-century conception of the South as an artistic wasteland – the Sahara of the Bozart, as H. L. Mencken famously termed it in 1917 – to the interwar period, when topflight works soared out of the region in such quantities that the era came to be known as the Southern Renaissance? Putting the First World War at the centre of his analysis, Davis explores how the war changed southern literature by forcing the region's writers to confront the disruptions of modernity.

In World War I and Southern Modernism, Davis introduces the idea of distal modernism to distinguish southern modernism from the modernism radiating from metropolises such as Berlin, Chicago, Paris, and New York. As he explains in the book's introduction, southern artists created “modernism without modernity” (7). Because they experienced modernity as “a phenomenon originating outside the region that disrupts everyday life within the region,” southerners were more likely to feel separated from and sceptical toward the modern than their urban counterparts, and the region's writers gave voice to these feelings in their texts (15). The book's five chapters survey a broad swath of such responses to modernism. Chapters 1 and 5 examine southern modernists’ reactions to increasing interregional contact and economic change, respectively. The second chapter describes how the war prompted white men, including William Alexander Percy and Donald Davidson, to renegotiate their allegiances: men whose feelings of loyalty to the region had long trumped their devotion to the nation now felt patriotism's pull as they joined with their fellow Americans in waging war against other countries. Chapter 3 delves into works by Walter White, Claude McKay, and other African American authors who depicted black southern soldiers fighting for freedom and equality abroad while being denied freedom and equality at home. The fourth chapter looks at how women writers – Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Ellen Glasgow among them – addressed changing domestic roles. The conclusion considers why World War I had a greater impact on southern literature than World War II.

Davis roots his arguments about how and why southern writers produced a distinctive stripe of modern literature in careful attention to material differences between the region and the rest of the nation. For instance, chapter 5 brings together nonfictional books by W. J. Cash, Virginius Dabney, Ben Robertson, and others to explore how southern industrialization took shape not as manufacturing plants following a Fordist production model, as in the North, but rather as textile mills organized around quasi-feudal relationships between labourers and employers. By tying his literary-critical claims to such concrete contrasts, Davis makes a convincing case for why divergent forms of modernization gave rise to divergent modernist forms.

Because each chapter engages with multiple works rather than concentrating on a single author or text, this study offers a big-picture perspective on the First World War's impact on the Southern Renaissance. World War I and Southern Modernism joins with other important recent studies – including Sarah Gardner's Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920–1941 (2017) and Susan Scott Parrish's The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (2017) – in shedding light on the decisive role the South played in shaping modern American literature and culture.