Martyn Bone makes a welcome contribution to the field of southern literary studies by demonstrating how newer critical theories of place can illuminate southern literature. Revising the traditional concept of a “sense of place” in southern literature, Bone analyzes the intersections between capitalist production in and literary representation of the American South in the 1960s through 1990s.

In close readings of eight significant novels (from Walker Percy's The Moviegoer to Toni Cade Bambara's Those Bones Are Not My Child), Bone details how authors have tried to assess the South's evolving modernization during the twentieth century, particularly its capitalist production and land development. He questions how writers have also grappled with the legacy of an agrarian proprietary ideal of the small subsistence farm as the South's defining salvation in the face of modern finance capitalism. He insists that adherence to such an ideal would prevent authors from adequately addressing the geographical and material developments in the region. He finds instead that the novels he studies engage with those historical shifts in a way that expands on “sense of place,” making it a flexible concept more able to convey “postsouthern geographies” and even the realities of transnationalism – without retreating into nonreferential narrative play or hyperrealism.

In the first section, Bone offers a sound revisionist reading of the agrarians themselves. Investigating how their rural ideals included an early commitment to small-farm ownership as a practical political program, Bone traces how this concept continued as an agrarian ideal even after they discarded any practical arguments. In a second chapter, he details how agrarian ideals shaped southern literary studies as a field and how critics have appropriated Eudora Welty's aesthetics of antidevelopment in a way that fails to account for actual capitalist spatial development in the South – and literary efforts to depict it.

In Part II, a four-chapter section, he finds a “postsouthern turn,” reading Robert Penn Warren's last novel, A Place to Come to, as a critique of Agrarian nostalgia and Percy's The Moviegoer as a record of postsouthern, suburban geography. He reads an even more aggressive critique of traditional notions of southern literature and place in three Richard Ford novels.

The final, particularly strong section of his book is his four-chapter assessment of Atlanta as a critically ignored postsouthern “international city” (in novels such as Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and Anne Rivers Siddons's popular fiction). For Bone, neoagrarian criticism ignores how Atlanta, as a New South model of industrial capitalism, necessitates evolving understandings of southern culture's capitalist abstraction. While his logic of selection is somewhat less convincing than it might be in his earlier inclusion of a chapter on Ford's New Jersey novel Independence Day, his bold move of focussing on Atlanta succeeds as a paradigm for his “historical-geographical materialist” approach. Addressing equally debates about the “postsouthern” and the theories of place forwarded by critics such as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and Edward Soja, Bone combines a sophisticated theoretical discussion with convincing close readings.