The History of Southern Literature

The History of Southern Literature edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Blyden Jackson, Rayburn S. Moore, Lewis P. Simpson, Thomas Daniel Young, Mary Ann Wimsatt, and Robert L. Phillips. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. xiv + 626 pages. $29.95.

As its title proudly promises, The History of Southern Literature is an ambitious feat of American collective scholarship. In several senses of the term, it is indeed a monument. Imposing in size (626 pages) and scope, it sets out to record Southern writing and writers from 1588 to 1982, from Thomas Hariot’s A Brief and True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia to Sylvia Wilkinson’s Bone of My Bone. In addition to the seven expert editors, some forty other scholars and historians have contributed seventy-five chapters on literary periods, figures, and genres, as well as historical events and cultural movements. This four-pound monument to a tradition still significantly anchored in place and past was subsidized by a private foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sponsored by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, it is issued “by the leading scholarly publisher in the field of Southern history and literature” (p. xiii). The project enjoyed the support services of librarians, computer experts, and typists from half a dozen Southern universities. On these and more intrinsic grounds, The History of Southern Literature claims an authority and cultural status no previous history or textbook of Southern writing earned for Louise Manly, W.P. Trent, Leonidas Warren Payne, or Jay B. Hubbell, whose 1954 study, The South in American Literature: 1607-1900, is the immediate ancestor of this volume. Given these circumstances, one is encouraged not only to consult but to read this history both for what it says about Southern writing, past and present, and for what it represents as historical-cultural document, the expression of values and beliefs of an influential group of contemporary intellectuals.