This book explores how an eclectic selection of narratives and images of the American South have been developed and disseminated. The contributors emphasize how ideas of “the South” have real social, political, and economic ramifications, and that they register at various local, regional, national, and transnational scales.

This book examines the ways in which the histories of racial violence, from slavery onwards, are manifest in representations of the body in twenty-first-century culture set in the US South. Christopher Lloyd focuses on corporeality in literature and film to detail the workings of cultural memory in the present. Drawing on the fields of Southern Studies, Memory Studies and Black Studies, the book also engages psychoanalysis, Animal Studies and posthumanism to revitalize questions of the racialized body. Lloyd traces corporeal legacies in the US South through novels by Jesmyn Ward, Kathryn Stockett and others, alongside film and television such as Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Walking Dead. In all, the book explores the ways in which bodies in contemporary southern culture bear the traces of racial regulation and injury.

Representations of southern poor whites have long shifted between romanticization and demonization. At worst, poor southern whites are aligned with racism, bigotry, and right-wing extremism, and, at best, regarded as the passive victims of wider, socioeconomic policies. In Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing, author Sarah Robertson pushes beyond these stereotypes and explores the impact of neoliberalism and welfare reform on depictions of poverty. Robertson examines representations of southern poor whites across various types of literature, including travel writing, photo-narratives, life-writing, and eco-literature, and reveals a common interest in communitarianism that crosses the boundaries of the US South and regionalism, moving past ideas about the culture of poverty to examine the economics of poverty. Included are critical examinations of the writings of southern writers such as Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, Barbara Kingsolver, Tim McLaurin, Toni Morrison, and Ann Pancake. Poverty Politics includes critical engagement with identity politics as well as reflections on issues including Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, and mountaintop removal. Robertson interrogates the presumed opposition between the Global North and the Global South and engages with microregions through case studies on Appalachian photo-narratives and eco-literature. Importantly, she focuses not merely on representations of southern poor whites, but also on writing that calls for alternative ways of reconceptualizing not just the poor, but societal measures of time, value, and worth.

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching Southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South--global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South--that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of Southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum Southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth-century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of Southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical Southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.

"In Keywords for Southern Studies, the editors have compiled an eclectic collection of essays which address the fluidity and ever-changing nature of southern studies by adopting a transnational, interdisciplinary focus. This book is termed 'critical' because the essays in it are pertinent to modern life beyond the world of 'southern studies.' The non-binary, non-traditional approach of Keywords unmasks and refuses the binary thinking -- First World/Third World, self/other -- that postcolonial studies has taught us is the worst rhetorical structure of empire. Keywords promotes a holistic way of thinking that starts with southern studies but extends even further"--

Where the New World Is assesses how fiction published since 1980 has resituated the U.S. South globally and how earlier twentieth-century writing already had done so in ways traditional southern literary studies tended to ignore. Martyn Bone argues that this body of fiction has, over the course of some eighty years, challenged received readings and understandings of the U.S. South as a fixed place largely untouched by immigration (or even internal migration) and economic globalization. The writers discussed by Bone emphasize how migration and labor have reconfigured the region’s relation to the nation and a range of transnational scales: hemispheric (Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti), transatlantic/Black Atlantic (Denmark, England, Mauritania), and transpacific/global southern (Australia, China, Vietnam). Writers under consideration include Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, John Oliver Killens, Russell Banks, Erna Brodber, Cynthia Shearer, Ha Jin, Monique Truong, Lan Cao, Toni Morrison, Peter Matthiessen, Dave Eggers, and Laila Lalami. The book also seeks to resituate southern studies by drawing on theories of “scale” that originated in human geography. In this way, Bone also offers a new paradigm in which the U.S. South is thoroughly engaged with a range of other scales from the local to the global, making both literature about the region and southern studies itself truly transnational in scope.

The South is often perceived as a haunted place in its region's literature, one that is strange, deviant, or "queer." The peculiar, often sexually charged literary worlds of contemporary writers like Fannie Flagg, Monique Truong, and Randall Kenan speak to this connection between queerness and the South. Heidi Siegrist explores the boundaries of negotiating place and sexuality by using the concept of Southernness—a purposefully fluid idea of the South that extends beyond simple geography, eschewing familiar ideas of the Southern canon. When the connection between queerness and Southerness becomes apparent, Siegrist shows a Southern-branded queer deviance can not only change the way we think about literature but can also change Southern queer people's lived experiences. Siegrist gathers a bevy of undertheorized writers, from Kenan and Truong to Dorothy Allison and even George R. R. Martin, showing that there are many "queer Souths." Siegrist offers these multiverses as a way to appreciate a place that is often unfriendly, even deadly, to queer people. But as Siegrist argues, none of these Souths, from the terrestrial to the imaginary, would be what they are without the influence and power of queer literature.