The North of the South: The Natural World and the National Imaginary in the Literature of the Upper South (Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures Ser.) - 9780820362519

Over the past generation the Deep South has become the primary site and the plantation the predominant referent in southern literary studies, developments that have followed academic interest over the past generation or two first in postcolonial studies and more recently in globalization studies and its terrain The Global South." In these talks, Barbara Ladd diverts some attention northward, to the Upper South, to "the North of the South." Ladd foregrounds the natural world and the role it played in the national imaginary of Upper South writers from Thomas Jefferson to Toni Morrison. The natural world of the Chesapeake Bay and Albemarle Cultural Hearths is distinctive in a number of ways and associated with the nationalist agenda much earlier than would be the natural world of the Deep South-much of which was acquired long after the American Revolution. To these ends, Ladd focuses on the world of Edgar Allan Poe, who was more of a naturalist than most people realize, on the Chesapeake Bay cultural hearth, on Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, and reads some of Poe's work as a melancholy response to the national and environmental imagination of that other famous Virginia naturalist, Thomas Jefferson. In this move, Ladd suggests the difference ecoregionalism might make both for our understanding of southern literature and literary history and for our understanding of the American cultural project. She also look northward into the Mid-Atlantic and westward from Richmond and the Blue Ridge into and beyond the Appalachians to explore the worlds of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison-all of whom (along with Poe) recast the narrative of nation-building in a melancholy tenor, as stories of loss and forgetting, and all of whom are remarkable nature writers"--

• | Author: Barbara Ladd
• | Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• | Publication Date: Oct 01, 2022
• | Number of Pages: 96 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0820362514
• | ISBN-13: 9780820362519