The mythos surrounding the Creole experience has been a contentious subject for scholars of New Orleans. This mythos, in part owing to the uncertain etymology of the term “Creole,” has contributed – as Rien Fertel acknowledges – to a constant stream of “confusions, controversies, and conflicts in New Orleans and in the wider postcolonial world” (9). The nature of the social, cultural and political changes that shaped Louisiana's development over the course of the long nineteenth century also problematizes any static ideas of “Creoleness” in this period. During this time, Louisiana was ceded to France and then the United States, twice accorded statehood, and invaded by Britain. Forced to safeguard itself against threats posed by outsiders, Creole New Orleanians also battled against the internal destruction of their own community – the imminence of which was brought to bear in the wake of the German Coast slave uprising of 1811. In the midst of these challenges, Louisiana's self-defined Creole community fought hard to preserve their ancestral identity.

In his book Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in New Orleans, Fertel explores how a white Creole literary elite harnessed the tools and networks of cultural production to preserve the memory of Creole culture in nineteenth-century New Orleans, and furthermore worked to rehabilitate symbolic associations of the word “Creole” in the larger American imagination. Taking a literary-historical approach, Fertel focusses on the interventions of such prominent Creole personalities as Charles Gayarré, described by Fertel as “the primogenitor of a Louisiana Creole literature” (14); Adrien Rouquette, the priest-cum-transcendentalist; Alfred Mercier, founder of the Athénée louisianais Creole fraternity; and Grace King, the local colorist and historian who, although not technically a “Creole,” “was the Creole's champion par excellence” (96). He also examines how this fraternity was galvanized by the publication of George Washington Cable's 1880 novel The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life.

Foregrounding early on that he uses “the word Creole … to refer to Louisiana's white Creole population” (9), he constructs a dialogic argument that charts the various ideological transmutations that contributed to the construction of a “mythic Creole city” (122). Fertel demonstrates how “Creole” was at first deployed by this community of writers as an expression of cultural pride, and was rooted in the preservation of the language, customs, and ideals of their colonial forebears. Inaugurated by Gayarré and Rouquette, this ethos was sustained through the salon culture and French-language publications of the Athénée louisianais. However, after the publication of Cable's The Grandissimes this literary circle “turned toward championing their whiteness rather than … their Frenchness” (73), reflecting a need to combat racialized attitudes about Creole identity within the United States.

With an informative notes section that highlights important bodies of work, and a comprehensive bibliography that testifies to the scale of his research, Fertel consolidates the information most relevant to his thesis within each chapter. Despite this, the force of his argument is at times inhibited by the structural breakdown of the book. The transition between the sections on Mercier, Cable and the Creole backlash, and Grace King is not altogether seamless, and one wonders whether the section on Cable would have worked better as an epilogue. This would have allowed Fertel the scope to explore, or interrogate the possibility of, other ideological challenges to the “imagined community” that these writers represented (122).

It nevertheless represents an important intervention in studies of Creole literary history, giving, for the first time, serious critical treatment of the white Creole print culture that contributed both to Creole identity formation and to ideologies of race and identity in the larger United States. New Orleans, as their operational hub, became the centre for the production of these ideas. The group of intellectuals around which his study pivots viewed themselves not only as exceptional, but also as caretakers of an exceptional cultural inheritance. In documenting the circumventional force of this pervasive Creole elite, he demonstrates how ideologies of cultural identity were transformed, appropriated, and, above all, preserved, and in this way affirms that circumventions, tensions, and resistance were as central to the Creole experience as amalgamation, syncretism, and exchange. This encourages the reader to think about the multiple obstructions encountered by Creoles of colour who also claimed a stake in this inheritance. Moving forward from this study, it is hoped that Fertel and others will endeavour to probe the depth of these tensions – and the cultural routes that Creoles of colour were forced to forge through them – in order to preserve the vitality and relevance of Creole studies, and literary studies of the American South.