Notions of southern culture run deep and wide through the American consciousness. Perhaps no region of the United States conjures up as many images or emotions as does the American South. Yet despite the stereotypes that resonate throughout society, it remains nearly impossible to categorize the many shades of culture found in the history of the southern states. Spanning from Atlantic coastal ecosystems to the Ozark Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico, the region is home to orange groves and Creole food; the Gothic Revival style and the New Urbanism movement; ragtime, Piedmont blues, and...

-This well could be the most important book yet published on Eudora Welty, - says noted Welty scholar Noel Polk. -It offers a revolutionary and convincing reading of Welty's The Golden Apples (1949), but its implications for the study of Welty as a writer go far and beyond its interpretation of this single text.-

Until the recent explosion of feminist critical interest in her work, Welty criticism was dominated by the narrow and singular perspective of her as a -white southern lady- writing first-rate -regional fiction.- Today her work is being closely re-examined for its...

From the popular legend of Pocahontas to the Civil War soap opera Gone with the Wind to countless sculpted heads of George Washington that adorn homes and museums, whole industries have emerged to feed America's addiction to imaginary histories that cover up the often violent acts of building a homogeneous nation. In Ersatz America, Rebecca Mark shows how this four-hundred-year-old obsession with false history has wounded democracy by creating language that is severed from material reality. Without the mediating touchstones of body and nature, creative representations of our...

From the popular legend of Pocahontas to the Civil War soap opera Gone with the Wind to countless sculpted heads of George Washington that adorn homes and museums, whole industries have emerged to feed America's addiction to imaginary histories that cover up the often violent acts of building a homogeneous nation. In Ersatz America, Rebecca Mark shows how this four-hundred-year-old obsession with false history has wounded democracy by creating language that is severed from material reality. Without the mediating touchstones of body and nature, creative representations of our...