Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 19201941 [Hardcover]

An examination of the literary marketplace's central role in creating the Southern Literary Renaissance.A new take on the origins of the Southern Literary Renaissance, Reviewing the South shows how book reviewing played a vital role in shaping an image of the South in the American national consciousness during the interwar years.A new take on the origins of the Southern Literary Renaissance, Reviewing the South shows how book reviewing played a vital role in shaping an image of the South in the American national consciousness during the interwar years.The American South received increased attention from national commentators during the interwar era. Beginning in the 1920s, the proliferation of daily book columns and Sunday book supplements in newspapers reflected a growing audience of educated readers and its demand for books and book reviews. This period of intensified scrutiny coincided with a boom in the publishing industry, which, in turn, encouraged newspapers to pay greater attention to the world of books. Reviewing the South shows how northern critics were as much involved in the Southern Literary Renaissance as Southern authors and critics. Southern writing, Gardner argues, served as a litmus to gauge Southern exceptionalism. For critics and their readers, nothing less than the region's ability to contribute to the vibrancy and growth of the nation was at stake.Introduction: from Renaissance to reformation; 1. The world the reviewers made; 2. The cultural economy of reading in the interwar years; 3. The South meets Harlem; 4. Confronting Jim Crow; 5. Away down South in the land of problems; 6. A class of burden bearers; 7. The most audacious book ever written by Southerners; 8. Fiction fights the Civil War; Epilogue.Gardner, one of America's leading literary historians, offers strikingly fresh insights into the South and the nation between the World Wars. In shifting our focus from authors to the commercial book industry, Gardner reveals a world of reviewerl³+