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A History Of Southern Identity
Oxford University Press
September 2005
On Sale: August 22, 2005
416 pages
ISBN: 0195089596
EAN: 9780195089592
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin
to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the
Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern
identity, served in an engaging blend of history,
literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book,
written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb
explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came
to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America. As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic
Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by
both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by
abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War,
defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated the
Cavalier myth into the cult of the "Lost Cause," which
supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade
to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I,
white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other
key figures of "Southern Renaissance" as well as their
African American counterparts in the "Harlem
Renaissance"--Cobb is the first to show the strong links
between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by
asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be
reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The
Southern self-image underwent another sea change in the wake
of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white
supremacy shook the old definition of the "Southern way of
life"--but at the same time, African Americans began to
examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their
regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium
turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought
on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is
everywhere, has the New South become the No South? Here then is a major work by one of America's finest
Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines
rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the
South means to southerners and to America as well.
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