Southern United States literature consists ofAmerican literature written about theSouthern United States or by writers from the region. Literature written about the American South first began during thecolonial era, and developed significantly during and after the period ofslavery in the United States. Traditional historiography of Southern United States literature emphasized a unifyinghistory of the region; the significance of family in the South's culture, a sense of community and the role of the individual, justice, the dominance ofChristianity and the positive and negative impacts of religion,racial tensions,social class and the usage oflocal dialects.^[1][2][3] However, in recent decades, the scholarship of the New Southern Studies has decentralized these conventional tropes in favor of a more geographically, politically, and ideologically expansive "South" or "Souths".^[4]

In its simplest form, Southern literature consists of writing about theAmerican South. Often, "the South" is defined, for historical as well as geographical reasons, as the states ofSouth Carolina,Georgia,Florida,Alabama,North Carolina,Virginia,Tennessee,Mississippi,Louisiana,Texas,Oklahoma,Kentucky,West Virginia andArkansas.^[5] Pre-Civil War definitions of the South often includedMissouri,Maryland, andDelaware as well. However, "the South" is also a social, political, economic, and cultural construct that transcends these geographical boundaries.^[6]

Southern literature has been described by scholars as occupying a liminal space within wider American culture.^[4] After theAmerican Revolution, writers in the U.S. from outside the South frequentlyothered Southern culture, in particularslavery, as a method of "[standing] apart from theimperial world order".^[6] These negative portrayals of the American South eventually diminished after theabolition of slavery in the U.S., particularly during a period after theSpanish–American War when many Americans began to re-evaluate theiranti-imperialistic views and support forimperialism grew. Changing historiographical trends have placed racism in the American South as emblematic of, rather than an exception to,U.S. racism as a whole.^[4][7]

In addition to the geographical component of Southern literature, certain themes have appeared because of the similar histories of the Southern states in regard to American slavery, theCivil War, and thereconstruction era. Theconservative culture in the American South has also produced a strong focus within Southern literature on the significance of family, religion, community in one's personal and social life, the use ofSouthern dialects,^[1] and a strong sense of "place."^[8]The South's troubled history withracial issues also continually appears in its literature.^[9]

Despite these common themes, there is debate as to what makes a literary work "Southern." For example,Mark Twain, a Missourian, defined the characteristics that many people associate with Southern writing in hisnovelAdventures of Huckleberry Finn.Truman Capote, born and raised in theDeep South, is best known for his novelIn Cold Blood, a piece with none of the characteristics associated with "southern writing." Other Southern writers, such as popular authorsAnne Rice andJohn Grisham, rarely write about traditional Southern literary issues.John Berendt, who wrote the popularMidnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, is not a Southerner. In addition, some famous Southern writers moved to the Northern U.S. So while geography is a factor, the geographical location of the author is notthe defining factor in Southern writing. Some suggest that "Southern" authors write in their individual way due to the impact of the strict cultural decorum in the South and the need to break away from it.^[10]

The earliest literature written in what would become the American South dates back to thecolonial era, in particularVirginia; the explorerJohn Smith wrote an account of the founding of the colonial settlement ofJamestown in the early 17th century, whileplanterWilliam Byrd II kept a diary of his day-to-day affairs during the early 18th century. Both sets of recollections are critical documents in early Southern history.

After theAmerican Revolution, in the early 19th century, the expansion ofSouthern plantations fueled by slave labor began to distinguish Southern society and culture more clearly from the other states of the young nations. During thisantebellum period,South Carolina, and particularly the city ofCharleston, rivaled and perhaps surpassed Virginia as a literary community. Writing in Charleston, the lawyer and essayistHugh Swinton Legare, the poetsPaul Hamilton Hayne andHenry Timrod, and the novelistWilliam Gilmore Simms composed some of the most important works in antebellum Southern literature. In Virginia,John Pendleton Kennedy gave an account of Virginia plantation life in his 1832 bookSwallow Barn.

Simms was a particularly significant figure, perhaps the most prominent Southern author before theAmerican Civil War. His novels of frontier life and the American revolution celebrated the history of South Carolina. LikeJames Fenimore Cooper, Simms was strongly influenced by Scottish authorWalter Scott, and his works bore the imprint of Scott'sromanticism. InThe Yemassee,The Kinsmen, and theanti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novelThe Sword and the Distaff, Simms presented idealized portraits of slavery and Southern life. While popular and well regarded in South Carolina—and highly praised by such critics asEdgar Allan Poe—Simms never gained a large national audience.

In Virginia,George Tucker produced in 1824 the first fiction of Virginia colonial life withThe Valley of Shenandoah. He followed in 1827 with one of the country's first science fictions,A Voyage to the Moon: With Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians. Tucker was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Virginia. In 1836 Tucker published the first comprehensive biography of Thomas Jefferson -The Life of Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States.^[11] Some critics also regard Poe as a Southern author—he was raised in Richmond, attended the University of Virginia, and edited theSouthern Literary Messenger from 1835 to 1837. Yet in his poetry and fiction Poe rarely took up distinctly Southern themes or subjects; his status as a "Southern" writer remains ambiguous.

In the Chesapeake region, meanwhile, antebellum authors of enduring interest includeJohn Pendleton Kennedy, whose novelSwallow Barn offered a colorful sketch of Virginia plantation life; andNathaniel Beverley Tucker, whose 1836 workThe Partisan Leader foretold the secession of the Southern states, and imagined a guerrilla war in Virginia between federal and secessionist armies.

Not all noteworthy Southern authors during this period were white.Frederick Douglass'sNarrative is perhaps the most famous first-person account of black slavery in the antebellum South.Harriet Jacobs, meanwhile, recounted her experiences in bondage in North Carolina inIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. And another Southern-born ex-slave,William Wells Brown, wroteClotel; or, The President's Daughter—widely believed to be the first novel ever published by anAfrican-American. The book depicts the life of its title character, a daughter ofThomas Jefferson and his black mistress, and her struggles under slavery.

In the second half of the 19th century, the South lost the Civil War and suffered through what many white Southerners considered a harsh occupation (calledReconstruction). In place of the anti-Tom literature came poetry and novels about the "Lost Cause of the Confederacy." This nostalgic literature began to appear almost immediately after the war ended;The Conquered Banner was published on June 24, 1865. These writers idealized the defeated South and its lost culture. Prominent writers with this point of view included poetsHenry Timrod,Daniel B. Lucas, andAbram Joseph Ryan, and fiction writerThomas Nelson Page. Others, likeAfrican American writerCharles W. Chesnutt, dismissed this nostalgia by pointing out^[where?] theracism and exploitation of blacks that happened during this time period in the South.

in 1856 George Tucker completed his final multivolume work in hisHistory of the United States, From Their Colonization to the End of the 26th Congress, in 1841.

In 1884,Mark Twain published what is arguably the most influential Southern novel of the 19th century,Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Ernest Hemingway said of the novel, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain calledHuckleberry Finn." This statement applies even more to Southern literature because of the novel's frank dealings with issues such as race and violence.

Kate Chopin was another central figure in post-Civil War Southern literature. Focusing her writing largely on the French Creole communities of Louisiana, Chopin established her literary reputation with the short story collectionsBayou Folk (1894) andA Night in Acadie (1897). These stories offered not only a sociological portrait of a specific Southern culture but also furthered the legacy of the American short story as a uniquely vital and complex narrative genre. But it was with the publication of her second and final novelThe Awakening (1899) that she gained notoriety of a different sort. The novel shocked audiences with its frank and unsentimental portrayal of female sexuality and psychology. It paved the way for the Southern novel as both a serious genre (based in the realism that had dominated the Western novel since Balzac) and one that tackled the complex and untidy emotional lives of its characters. Today she is widely regarded as not only one of the most important female writers in American literature, but one of the most important chroniclers of the post-Civil War South and one of the first writers to treat the female experience with complexity and without condescension.

During the first half of the 20th century, the lawyer, politician, minister, orator, actor, and authorThomas Dixon, Jr., wrote a number of novels, plays, sermons, and non-fiction pieces which were very popular with the general public all over the USA. Dixon's greatest fame came from a trilogy of novels aboutReconstruction, one of which was entitledThe Clansman (1905), a book and then a wildly successful play, which would eventually become the inspiration forD. W. Griffith's highly controversial 1915 filmThe Birth of a Nation. Overall Dixon wrote 22 novels, numerous plays and film scripts,^[12] Christian sermons, and some non-fiction works.

In the 1920s and 1930s, a renaissance in Southern literature began with the appearance of writers such asWilliam Faulkner,Katherine Anne Porter,Caroline Gordon,Allen Tate,Thomas Wolfe,Robert Penn Warren, andTennessee Williams, among others. Because of the distance theSouthern Renaissance authors had from theAmerican Civil War andslavery, they were more objective in their writings about the South. During the 1920s, Southern poetry thrived under theVanderbilt "Fugitives". In nonfiction,H.L. Mencken's popularity increased nationwide as he shocked and astounded readers with his satiric writing highlighting the inability of the South to produce anything of cultural value. In reaction to Mencken's essay, "The Sahara of the Bozart," theSouthern Agrarians (also based mostly around Vanderbilt) called for a return to the South's agrarian past and bemoaned the rise of Southern industrialism and urbanization. They noted that creativity and industrialism were not compatible and desired the return to a lifestyle that would afford the Southerner leisure (a quality the Agrarians most felt conducive to creativity). Writers like Faulkner, who won theNobel Prize in Literature for 1949, also brought new techniques such asstream of consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their writings. For instance, his novelAs I Lay Dying is told by changing narrators ranging from the deceased Addie to her young son.

The late 1930s also saw the publication of one of the best-known Southern novels,Gone with the Wind byMargaret Mitchell. Thenovel, published in 1936, quickly became a bestseller. It won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize, and in 1939 an equally famousmovie of the novel premiered. In the eyes of some modern scholars, Mitchell's novel consolidated white supremacist Lost Cause ideologies (seeLost Cause of the Confederacy) to construct a bucolic plantation South in which slavery was a benign, or even benevolent, institution. Under this view, she presents white southerners as victims of a rapacious Northern industrial capitalism and depicts black southerners as either lazy, stupid, and over sexualized, or as docile, childlike, and resolutely loyal to their white masters. Southern literature has always drawn audiences outside the South and outside the United States, andGone with the Wind has continued to popularize harmful stereotypes of southern history and culture for audiences around the world.^[13] Despite this criticism,Gone with the Wind has enjoyed an enduring legacy as the most popular American novel ever written, an incredible achievement for a female writer. Since publication,Gone with the Wind has become a staple in many Southern homes.

Southern literature following the Second World War grew thematically as it embraced the social and cultural changes in the South resulting from theCivil Rights Movement. In addition, more non-Christian, homosexual, female andAfrican-American writers began to be accepted as part of Southern literature, including African Americans such asZora Neale Hurston andSterling Allen Brown, along with women such asEudora Welty,Flannery O'Connor,Ellen Glasgow,Carson McCullers,Katherine Anne Porter, andShirley Ann Grau, among many others. Other well-known Southern writers of this period includeReynolds Price,James Dickey,William Price Fox,Davis Grubb,Walker Percy, andWilliam Styron. One of the most highly praised Southern novels of the 20th century,To Kill a Mockingbird byHarper Lee, won thePulitzer Prize when it was published in 1960. New Orleans native and Harper Lee's friend,Truman Capote also found great success in the middle 20th century withBreakfast at Tiffany's and laterIn Cold Blood. Another famous novel of the 1960s isA Confederacy of Dunces, written byNew Orleans nativeJohn Kennedy Toole in the 1960s but not published until 1980. It won thePulitzer Prize in 1981 and has since become acult classic.

Southern poetry bloomed in the decades following the Second World War in large part thanks to the writing and efforts ofRobert Penn Warren andJames Dickey. Where earlier work primarily championed a white, agrarian past, the efforts of such poets as Dave Smith,Charles Wright,Ellen Bryant Voigt,Yusef Komunyakaa, Jim Seay,Frank Stanford,Kate Daniels,James Applewhite,Betty Adcock,Rodney Jones, and former U.S. Poet LaureateNatasha Trethewey have opened up the subject matter and form of Southern poetry.^[14]

Today, in the early twenty-first century, the American South is undergoing a number of cultural and social changes, including rapid industrialization/deindustrialization, climate change, and an influx of immigrants. As a result, the exact definition of what constitutes Southern literature is changing. While some critics specify that the previous definitions of Southern literature still hold, with some of them suggesting, only somewhat in jest, that all Southern literature must still contain a dead mule within its pages, most scholars of the twenty-first century South highlight the proliferation of depictions of "Souths": urban, undead, queer, activist, televisual, cinematic, and particularly multiethnic (particularlyLatinos,Native American, andAfrican American).^{[15][16][17][18][19]} Not only do these critics argue that the very fabric of the South has changed so much that the old assumptions about southern literature no longer hold, but they argue that the U.S. South has always been a construct.^[20]

Among today's prominent southern writers areTim Gautreaux,William Gay,Padgett Powell,Pat Conroy,Fannie Flagg,Randall Kenan,Ernest Gaines,John Grisham,Mary Hood,Lee Smith,Tom Robbins,Tom Wolfe,Wendell Berry,Cormac McCarthy,Ron Rash,Barry Hannah,Donna Tartt,Anne Rice,Edward P. Jones,Barbara Kingsolver,Margaret Maron,Anne Tyler,Larry Brown,Horton Foote,Allan Gurganus,George Singleton,Clyde Edgerton,Daniel Wallace,Kaye Gibbons,Winston Groom,Lewis Nordan,Richard Ford,Ferrol Sams,Natasha Trethewey,Claudia Emerson,Dave Smith,Olympia Vernon,Jill McCorkle,Andrew Hudgins,Maurice Manning, andJesmyn Ward.

• Black Warrior Review — Published by University of Alabama
• Georgia Review — Published by University of Georgia
• Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts — Published at the University of Houston.
• Jabberwock Review — published byMississippi State University
• Southern Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine — (1835–1837)
• Sewanee Review — America's oldest continuously published literary quarterly (published at theUniversity of the South)
• Shenandoah — Published byWashington and Lee University
• Southern Literary Journal — (1964–present)
• Mississippi Quarterly — A refereed, scholarly journal dedicated to the life and culture of the American South, past and present.[1]
• TheOxford American — A quarterly journal of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography, and music from and about the South.
• The Southern Review — The famous literary journal focusing on southern literature.
• storySouth — A journal of new writings from the American South. Features fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and more.
• Southern Cultures — Peer-reviewed quarterly of the history, arts, and cultures of the US South, published since 1993, from the UNC Center for the Study of the American South.
• Southern Spaces — Peer-Reviewed Internet journal examining the spaces and places of the American South.

Around 2000 "the 'James Agee Film Project' conducted a poll of book editors, publishers, scholars and reviewers, asking which of the thousands of Southern prose works published during the past century should be considered 'the most remarkable works of modern Southern Literature." Results of the poll yielded the following titles:^[21]

• Literature of Southern states:Alabama;Arkansas;Florida;Georgia;Kentucky;Louisiana;Maryland;Mississippi,North Carolina;South Carolina;Tennessee;Texas;Virginia;West Virginia
• American literary regionalism
• Southern Gothic
• Southern noir
• Fellowship of Southern Writers
• African-American literature
• Louisiana State University Press

• Louise Manly (1895).Southern Literature from 1579-1895. Richmond: B.F. Johnson Publishing Company – via Project Gutenberg.

• Edwin Anderson Alderman;Joel Chandler Harris; Charles William Kent (eds.).Library of Southern Literature. Atlanta: Martin and Hoyt Company – viaHathiTrust. 1909-1913 (16 volumes)
• Montrose Jonas Moses (1910).Literature of the South. New York:Thomas Y. Crowell Co.
• Beatty, Richmond C.; Watkins, Floyd C.; Young, Thomas Daniel, eds. (1952).The Literature of the South. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company.
• Parks, Edd Winfield (1962).Ante-Bellum Southern Literary Critics. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
• Marion Montgomery, "The Sense of Violation: Notes toward a Definition of 'Southern' Fiction," The Georgia Review, 19 (1965)
• Holman, C. Hugh (1966).Three Modes of Modern Southern Fiction: Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.OCLC 859825215.
• Holman, C. Hugh; Rubin, Louis D. Jr.; Sullivan, Walter (1969).Southern Fiction: Renaissance and Beyond. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.OCLC 489993640.
• Flannery O'Connor, "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," in Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969)
• Davis, Richard Beale; Holman, C. Hugh; Rubin, Louis D. Jr. (1970).Southern Writing, 1585-1920. New York: Odyssey Press.OCLC 907422022.
• Holman, C. Hugh (1972).The Roots of Southern Writing. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.ISBN 9780820302904.
• Holman, C. Hugh; Rubin, Louis D. Jr. (1975).Southern Literary Study: Promise and Possibilities. University of North Carolina Press.ISBN 9780807812525.
• Holman, C. Hugh (1977).The Immoderate Past: The Southern Writer and History. University of Georgia Press.ISBN 9780820304199.
• Michael O'Brien (1979).The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941. Johns Hopkins University Press.ISBN 978-0801840173
• Charles Reagan Wilson; William Ferris, eds. (1989).Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. University of North Carolina Press.ISBN 0807818232.. Fulltext articles via the university's "Documenting the American South" website:
  • Beginnings of Southern Literature,Antebellum Era,Autobiography,Biography,Black Literature,Civil War in Literature,Folklore in Literature,Humor in Literature,Local Color Era,Regionalism and Local Color,Travel Writing
• The History of Southern Literature by Louis Rubin. Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
• Louis D. Rubin Jr., "From Combray to Ithaca; or, The 'Southernness' of Southern Literature," in The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree (Louisiana State University Press, 1991)
• Veronica Makowsky (1996),Walker Percy and Southern Literature (Explores the overall issues surrounding what makes for southern literature)
• Michael Kreyling (1998).Inventing Southern Literature. University Press of Mississippi.ISBN 978-1-60473-776-9.
• Fred Hobson (1999).But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative. Louisiana State University Press.ISBN 978-0-8071-4078-9.
• Ronald Lora; William Henry Longton, eds. (1999). "Southern Reviews, 1828-1880".Conservative Press in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-century America. Greenwood. pp. 147–282.ISBN 978-0-313-31043-0.
• Ernest Suarez (1999).Southbound: Interviews with Southern Poets. University of Missouri Press.ISBN 978-0-8262-6168-7.
• Richard J. Gray (2000).Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problem of Regionalism. Louisiana State University Press.ISBN 978-0-8071-2552-6.
• Jerry Leath Mills (2000)."The Dead Mule Rides Again".Southern Culture.6 (4).. (Explanation of what constitutes "good" southern writing)
• Patricia Yeager (2000).Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990. University of Chicago Press.ISBN 978-0226944913.

• Houston A. Baker (2001).Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.. Duke University Press.ISBN 978-0822326953.
• Joseph M. Flora; Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, eds. (2001).Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs.Louisiana State University Press.ISBN 978-0-8071-2692-9.
• Where is the South in Today's Southern Literature? Article exploring 2002 changes in southern literature.
• The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition: What Every American Needs to Know Edited by James Trefil, Joseph F. Kett, and E. D. Hirsch. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
• Carolyn Perry; Mary Louise Weaks, eds. (2002).History of Southern Women's Literature. Louisiana State University Press.ISBN 978-0-8071-2753-7.
• Suzanne W. Jones; Sharon Monteith, eds. (2002).South to A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Southern Literary Studies. Louisiana State University Press.ISBN 978-0-8071-2840-4.
• Tara McPherson (2003).Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Duke University Press.ISBN 978-0822330400.
• "Genres of Southern Literature" by Lucinda MacKethan. Southern Spaces, Feb. 2004.
• Jon Smith; Deborah Cohn, eds. (2004).Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies. Duke University Press.ISBN 978-0822333166.
• Leigh Anne Duck (2006).The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. University of Georgia Press.ISBN 978-0820334189.
• Riché Richardson (2007).Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta. University of Georgia Press.ISBN 978-0820328904.
• Anderson, Eric Gary. "On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession"Southern Spaces. August 9, 2007.
• Leigh Anne Duck (July 2008). "Southern Nonidentity."Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 9 (3): 319–330.
• Harilaos Stecopoulos (2008).Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976. Cornell University Press.ISBN 978-0801475023.
• M. Thomas Inge, ed. (2008).Literature. Vol. 9. University of North Carolina Press.ISBN 9781469616643.OCLC 910189354.{{cite book}}:|work= ignored (help)
• Scott Romine (2008).The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. Louisiana State University Press.ISBN 978-0807156384.
• Jennifer Rae Greeson (2010).Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Harvard University Press.ISBN 978-0674024281.
• Thadious M. Davis (2011).Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature. University of North Carolina Press.ISBN 978-0807835210.
• Deborah Barker; Kathryn McKee, eds. (2011).American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary. University of Georgia Press.ISBN 978-0820337104.
• Jonathan Daniel Wells (2011).Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 978-1-139-50349-5.
• Melanie Benson Taylor (2012).Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause. University of Georgia Press.ISBN 978-0820338842.
• Jay Watson (2012).Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985. University of Georgia Press.ISBN 978-0820343389.
• Richard Gray (2012). "Regionalism in the South".A History of American Literature (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.ISBN 978-1-4443-4568-1.
• Keith Cartwright (2013).Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways: Travels in Deep Southern Time, Circum-Caribbean Space, Afro-Creole Authority. University of Georgia Press.ISBN 978-0820345994.
• Matthew Pratt Guterl (2013).American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. Harvard University Press.ISBN 978-0674072282.
• Claudia Milian (2013).Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies. University of Georgia Press.ISBN 978-0820344362.
• Jon Smith (2013).Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies. University of Georgia Press.ISBN 978-0820345260.
• Jason Phillips, ed. (2013).Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South. Louisiana State University Press.ISBN 978-0-8071-5035-1.
• David A. Davis; Tara Powell, eds. (2014).Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways. University Press of Mississippi.ISBN 978-1-62674-210-9.
• Eric Gary Anderson; Taylor Hagood; Daniel Cross Turner, eds. (2015).Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture. Louisiana State University Press.ISBN 978-0807161074.
• Martyn Bone; Brian Ward; William A. Link, eds. (2015).Creating and Consuming the American South. University Press of Florida.ISBN 978-0813060699.
• Fred Hobson; Barbara Ladd, eds. (2016).Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South. Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-19-049394-3.
• Susan Castillo Street; Charles L. Crow, eds. (2016).Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic. Springer.ISBN 978-1-137-47774-3.
• Jennifer Rae Greeson; Scott Romine, eds. (2016).Keywords for Southern Studies. University of Georgia Press.ISBN 978-0820349626.

• Library of Southern Literature, University of North Carolina American Southern literature pre-1929.
• The Center for Southern Literature
• "Writers".A Checklist of Scholarship on Southern Literature. Archived fromthe original on December 6, 2008. (A checklist of scholarship on writers associated with the American South; directory arranged by period: colonial, contemporary, etc. Sponsored by Mississippi Quarterly. Ceased publication. )
• Southern Poetry from Holman Prison Death Row Inmate Darrell Grayson
• "Poets in Place," atSouthern Spaces.
• "Society for the Study of Southern Literature".Organization founded in 1968 devoted to scholarship on writings and writers of the American South
• History of Southern Literature online publishing. Since 1995 the American South has relied on the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature for quality fiction, poetry and more.

• Southern United States literature
• Culture of the Southern United States
• American literary movements

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