The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (Southern Literary Studies)

In this innovative book, Martyn Bone explores perspectives of the southern "sense of place" and examines it in a national and global context. Bone assesses work of Neo-Agrarian writers William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, as well as more recent responses to the impact of capitalist spatial development on the South-including the self-declared "international city" of Atlanta. Close readings of novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Anne Rivers Siddons, Tom Wolfe, and Toni Cade Bambara illuminate ideas about capital, land, labor, and class while introducing southern literary studies into a wider debate. Bone concludes with works of Harry Crews and Barbara Kingsolver that suggest the southern sense of place may not be only southern, but diversely transnational.