Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach

"As a long-established scholar of southern literature, Lowe makes a significant contribution to the discussion of southern identity. . . . Clearly Lowe has assembled a collection of scholarship that will determine the direction for southern studies in the twenty-first century."—African American Review

A panorama of past and contemporary southern society are captured in Bridging Southern Cultures by some of the South's leading historians, anthropologists, literary critics, musicologists, and folklorists. Crossing the chasms of demographics, academic disciplines, art forms, and culture, this exciting collection reaches aspects of southern heritage that previous approaches have long obscured.

Virtually every dimension of southern identity receives attention here. William Andrews,Thadious Davis, Sue Bridwell Beckham, Richard Megraw, and Joyce Marie Jackson offer engaging reflections on art, age, race, and gender. Bertram Wyatt-Brown delivers a startling reading of Faulkner, revealing the tangled history of southern modernism. Daniel C. Littlefield, Henry Shapiro, and Charles Reagan Wilson provide important assessments of Africanisms in southern culture, Appalachian studies, and the blessing and burden of southern culture. John Shelton Reed probes the humorous and awkward aspects of the South's midlife crisis. John Lowe shows how the myth of the biracial southern family complicated plantation-school narratives for both white and black writers.

Showcasing the thought of preeminent southern intellectuals, Bridging Southern Cultures is a timely assessment of the state of contemporary southern studies.

These essays by some of the South's leading historians, anthropologists, literary critics, musicologists, and folklorists provide a multicultural, interdisciplinary panorama of past and contemporary southern society. Using the best of current scholarship, Bridging Southern Cultures demonstrates the new energies revitalizing southern studies. By spanning the chasms of race, gender, class, academic disciplines, art forms, and "high" and popular culture, this collection reaches aspects of southern heritage that previous approaches have obscured for too long.

John Lowe, professor of English at Louisiana State University, is the author of Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy and the editor of Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina, Conversations with Ernest Gaines, and The Future of Southern Letters.