“Tell about the South,” one of the characters of William Faulkner's 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! implores his southern friend. “What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” That request, or rather demand, betrays the fascination that the American South holds for many of us. We may not have crossed the Mason–Dixon line, but we believe we know about the South from Gone with the Wind or A Streetcar Named Desire, Elvis Presley and Muddy Waters, all those movies set in a dark swamp or a decaying mansion that trace what Faulkner once called the “implacable and brooding image” of the region.

Except, of course, we do not know it really. What we know is something dreamed up from a variety of sources, including our own assumptions of cultural centrality. And what Americans, in particular, know and tell about the South is also a function of their search for national identity. The South, as Jennifer Rae Greeson argues in this compelling and occasionally brilliant book, is an internal other for the nation: “an intrinsic part of the national body that nonetheless is differentiated and held apart from the whole” (1).

Writing about regionalism once, Raymond Williams (The Country and the City, 1970, 199) pointed out that the terms “region” and “regional” should be seen as a product and symptom, however apparently innocent, of centralized cultural dominance. “The life and people of certain favoured regions are seen as essentially general, even perhaps normal,” Williams suggested, “while the life and people of certain other regions are, well, regional.” Taking her cue from Williams, and from other critics who have argued that the supposed aberrations of the South depend on certain assumptions about American normalcy, Greeson offers a detailed and convincing map of the idea of South as other. The case of the American South, she demonstrates, is a perfect illustration of the fact that what is materially marginal or aberrant in the modern nation-state is often what is symbolically central to it.

Greeson traces what she calls the “symbiotic ideological juxtaposition” (1) of American nation and Southern region from the founding of the United States to the early twentieth century. Focussing on a variety of genres that include gothic and romance novels, transcendentalist and abolitionist texts, geography textbooks and travel writing, she shows how the idea of a solid South, different from yet integral to the United States, emerged with the founding of the nation. She also shows how the South, with its semitropical climate, plantation economy and heterogeneous population, once framed and informed European understanding of the New World – and also how writers in the new republic, through their opposition to the South, proclaimed the independence of their nation and their separation from the old world order.

What Greeson manages to do in this remarkable book, in effect, is to reemphasize and reinforce certain developing trends in the study of the South and, beyond that, the politics of culture. The South, she reminds us, as an internal other from the inception of the United States, lies simultaneously inside and outside the national imaginary; it is also at once colonizer and colonized; and, instead of supplying something as simple and parochial as a locus of domestic regional variation from United States literature, it gestures beyond the national border. So to understand the meanings and workings of the South requires a genuinely comparatist, transnational approach.

Greeson charts three distinct phases in the developing idea of southern difference. There was first, she suggests, a “Plantation South” that served writers trying to negotiate an emergent nationalism; then a “Slave South” that supplied a basic yardstick for measuring the growth of industrialization and continental expansion; and, after that, a “Reconstruction South” that enabled writers to consider the challenge of American empire. Distinctive though they are, however, they are, Greeson shows, connected chapters in a single and singular narrative of nation building. Nationalism, as one distinguished historian of the subject, Ernest Gellner (Thought and Change, 1964), has claimed, is not the awakening of a nation to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist. This groundbreaking account supports and sustains that claim; in doing so, it also shows how “our South” has always been a vital tool for thinking and talking about the power, promise and international positioning of the United States.