What we have in this collection of essays is a useful example of what southern studies has increasingly become: the representation of a southern space as a border territory, a place of cultural encounter. That encounter could be described as dialogic, if we focus on verbal exchange, or dialectical, if we look at the broader ranges of mutual alteration. However described, in whatever forms the story of the South is told, that story always was and remains syncretic, a cultural hybrid – one that can only be told and read in transnational discursive contexts, across conventional demarcation lines of region and nation. The meetings that have occurred in the border territory of the South – and, before it, in what cultural anthropologists have come to term the southeastern culture area – may sometimes be antagonistic, sometimes more conciliatory or even collaborative; more often than not, they may involve a mixture – of enmity and amity, resistance and engagement, conflict and reciprocity. In any event, any map of the South needs to register this, its heterogeneous character, the fact that it exists at the confluence of cultures – and has always done so. There is – inevitably, given the conflicted, contingent history of the region – a whole range of ways of registering this heterogeneity, and many of them are on display here.

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South offers a rich mix of interpretive frames for understanding the dynamic and plural character of the writing of the region. Or, as the editor Sharon Monteith puts it in her lively and challenging introduction to the volume, “This Companion examines the ways in which the region's writers have struggled over the dominant images of very different ‘Souths,’ nurturing and propagating them and resisting and rejecting them down the centuries” (1). Roughly chronological, the collection begins with Kathryn B. McKee's incisive account of what she sees as the fluid, heterogeneous character of nineteenth-century literature in the South. This is followed by attempts at revisionary readings of the slave narrative and the neo-slave narrative, the literature of the Civil War and the literature of Reconstruction by, respectively, Judie Newman, Will Kaufman and Scott Romine. All three contributors, while focussing on the historical moments announced in the titles to their essays, incorporate vital and relevant work from other, later eras into their discussion. Ernest Suarez, given the unenviable task of covering all southern verse in poetry and song, has to take the crossing of (admittedly permeable) chronological barriers further, tracing poetic continuities from the early nineteenth century to the present. After this, the ten remaining essays follow the model set up by the first three: focussing on critical moments in the writing of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century South, the authors of all these essays nevertheless cross historical, as well as geographical and other, boundaries when they feel the need to do so. So Gary Richards, writing on southern drama, while devoting most attention to more recent figures, pushes his investigation as far back as seventeenth-century Virginia; Michael Bibler ranges across centuries in his exploration of homosexual and homoerotic readings of southern texts; and Sarah Gleeson-White, like many of her fellow contributors, defies generic boundaries as she examines different kinds of encounter between southern writers and Hollywood.

Just about all the contributors attempt revisionary readings of their subject, with inevitably varying degrees of success. In one of the less convincing essays in the collection, Judie Newman claims that “neither the slave narrative nor its descendant, the neo-slave narrative, feature on the map of Southern literature” (27), which will be news to those of us who have written on such narratives in precisely this context. She then spends too much time on a survey of secondary literature and on announcing commonplaces as if they were discoveries. David A. Davis's thoughtful attempt to reconsider southern modernism is, in turn, marred by his tendency to elide modernism with modernity, social provincialism with conservatism, and aesthetic experiment with social and political radicalism. And Sarah Roberts, in an otherwise informed and provocative account of the writing of southern poverty, surely underestimates the degree to which many southern writers of the Depression era actually challenged stereotyping of poor whites as “white trash” or “rednecks.” On the other hand, Scott Romine's essay on the way literature helped shape images of Reconstruction offers some brilliant reexaminations of familiar and not so familiar authors, notably Albion Tourgée. John T. Matthews makes a persuasive case for a radical rereading of the Southern Renaissance and, in particular, the work of William Faulkner. Pearl Amelia McHaney, in a sensitive examination of southern women writers, invites us to see the subtle acts of exclusion often accompanying the use of that category. Sharon Monteith offers a groundbreaking account of civil rights fiction. And Nahem Yousaf, in the final essay in the collection, remaps the regional literature by focussing on writing of and about recent immigrants – presenting us, in the process, with an utterly convincing portrait of what he calls “a more worlded South” (217).

Apart from the variable quality of the essays – something that is, perhaps, inevitable in any collection of this kind – there are also one or two more general problems. It is probably impossible to do justice to a topic as vast and heterogeneous as the literature of the South in just fourteen essays and little more than two hundred pages. Anyone familiar with that topic will almost immediately notice significant gaps and absences and subjects given less than their due. There are, after all, just four essays focussing on the nineteenth-century South, Mark Twain gets little more than a mention, and Native American literature gets much less attention than it deserves. Most problematic of all, in my opinion, is the fact that this book only starts with the early nineteenth century. The editor implicitly defends this by pointing out, in her description of the first essay, that it “begins in the 1830s, the decade that most scholars agree signaled the shift to sectional self-interest that promoted the South as a cultural, as well as a political, entity” (3). This, however, begs several questions (the emergence of sectional self-interest, after all, is not necessarily coincident with the beginnings of sectional or regional self-identification); it ignores the fact that many, perhaps most, other histories, collections and anthologies dealing with the South begin with the colonial period; and it seriously underestimates the degree to which the whole issue of the origins of a distinctive southern identity is open to debate. The point Monteith makes here is a defensible one, certainly, but to use it as a reason for excluding the colonial and Revolutionary periods – useful though that exclusion might be in terms of saving space – is surely not quite so defensible. In any event, some contributors feel compelled to refer, however briefly, to those periods, which only emphasizes the (to my mind) incomplete and over-selective character of this collection. The impression of over-selectiveness is, unfortunately, compounded by the list of “Further Reading” at the end of the volume, which is as notable for what it ignores as for what it includes.

It would be wrong, however, to spend too much time on the flaws, the gaps or absences, in this remarkable collection. Taken as a whole, it offers a whole series of exciting and innovative perspectives on the vexed subject of the South, and to say that it is not comprehensive is probably no more than to say that no single volume ever could be. Reading it, with real pleasure, I was reminded of how much has changed, and for the better, in southern studies. Since the 1970s, after all, there has been a rigorous critique of former, traditionalist approaches to southern literature and an unremitting deconstruction of the whole notion of South. Conceptually, scholars have refocussed attention on the idea of the South, the region as partly or wholly a symbolic construct. Critically, as collections such as this one illustrate, there has been a radical rewriting of the region, taking into account both those who have always been there but ignored or marginalized (Native Americans, African Americans, women) and those whose relatively recent arrival has altered everything beyond recognition. And culturally, geopolitically, everything has been recalibrated, the axis and circumference of southern studies has been shifted to vanishing point, by the immersion of what was once known as the South in what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has called “the international hodgepodge of postmodern culture” with its accompaniments in global capitalism and transnational drift.Footnote ¹ The American tropics, the black Atlantic, “a more worlded South”: phrases like these alert us to the forces that have helped break up the old models, as more and more commentators operate above or below the regionalist radar or actively challenge nationalist and regionalist categories. So maybe the New Southern Studies should be renamed; maybe a more appropriate label for what is going on right now, and needs to go on, is No Southern Studies. In short, maybe it is time for the long-announced but long-delayed arrival of transnational studies – including some of the perspectives adopted in this book. The simpler strategies of exclusion adopted by traditionalists and arguably still practised by some of those involved in the New Southern Studies (“them” or “us”? “Southern” or “other”? South – “fact” or “idea”?) will then be replaced by more varied, inclusive models of knowledge – and ones more responsive to the actual, messy nature of history.