Southern Literature From 1579-1895.

To gather three centuries of a region's writing between two covers is an act of both preservation and portraiture. This anthology sets out to give the American South a literary map.

What it's about

Southern Literature From 1579-1895 is a compilation of writing associated with the American South over a span of more than three hundred years. It draws together a variety of forms, poetry, prose, and passages of historical and documentary interest, arranged to represent the region's authors and their work from the early period through to the late nineteenth century. As an anthology, it functions as both a reader and a survey, introducing many voices in a single volume.

Themes

The collection is concerned with region and identity, with the effort to define a distinctively Southern literary tradition, and with the ways literature records a people's history, landscape and self-understanding. Spanning the colonial era through the aftermath of the Civil War, it inevitably carries the marks of its time and place, and it reflects the assumptions and perspectives of the era in which it was assembled.

Why it still matters

As a historical anthology, it preserves selections and authors that might otherwise be scattered or forgotten, and it documents how one region's literature was understood and canonised in the nineteenth century. For students of American literary history, and of the South in particular, it is a useful gathering point and a revealing artefact of its moment.

Who it's for

For readers of American literary history, students of Southern writing, and anyone curious about how a region's literature was collected and presented in an earlier age. It rewards those who enjoy anthologies as maps of a tradition and as documents in their own right.