The Future of Southern Letters

The New South -- home of shopping malls, hub airports, HooDoo, "Good Ole Boys," empowered African Americans, and immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Haiti -- is still haunted by the Gothic ghosts of its past. Does this collision of past and present account for America's fascination with new Southern writers like Bobbie Ann Mason, Ernest Gaines, Rita Mae Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Cormac McCarthy, Dorothy Allison, and Allan Gurganus? Or does this popularity stem from their clinging to a stereotypical past that a national audience requires? Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe have assembled a remarkable team of scholars and writers to address topics such as the past, humor, black autobiography, ethnicity, and female oral traditions in an attempt to define Southern culture today and ask who will be writing Southern literature tomorrow. The answers they give will interest readers of Southern literature and history, creative writers, and scholars and students of Southern culture.