Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi (2000)

The literature of the contemporary South might best be understood for its discontinuity with the literary past. At odds with traditions of the Southern Renascence, southern literature of today sharply refutes the Nashville Agrarians and shares few of Faulkner’s and Welty’s concerns about place, community, and history.

This sweeping study of the literary South’s new direction focuses on nine well established writers who, by breaking away from the firmly ensconced myths, have emerged as an iconoclastic generation- — Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Randall Kenan, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and Barry Hannah. Resisting the modernist methods of the past, they have established their own postmodern ground beyond the shadow of their predecessors.

This shift in authorial perspective is a significant indicator of the future of southern writing. Crews’s seminal role as a ground-breaking “poor white” author, Mason’s and Crews’s portrayals of rural life, and Allison’s and Brown’s frank portrayals of the lower class pose a challenge to traditional depictions of the South. The dissenting voices of Gibbons and Kenan, who focus on gender, race, and sexuality, create fiction that is at once identifiably “southern” and also distinctly subversive. Gibbons’s iconoclastic stance toward patriarchy, like the outsider’s critique of community found in Kenan’s work, proffers a portrait of the South unprecedented in the region’s literature. Ford, McCarthy, and Hannah each approach the South’s traditional notions of history and community with new irreverence and treat familiar southern topics in a distinctly postmodern manner. Whether through Ford’s generic consumer landscape, the haunted netherworld of McCarthy’s southern novels, or Hannah’s riotous burlesque of the Civil War, these authors assail the philosophical and cultural foundations from which the Southern Renascence arose.

Challenging the conventional conceptions of the southern canon, this is a provocative and innovative contribution to the region’s literary study.

New York, NY: Norton (2014)

“Dog days and the fresh bodies are arriving once again.” So begins the fall term at South Carolina Medical College, where Dr. Jacob Thacker is on probation for Xanax abuse. His interim career working public relations for the dean takes an unnerving detour into the past when the bones of African American slaves, over a century old, are unearthed on campus. Out of the college s dark past, these bones threaten to rise and condemn the present.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Dr. Frederick Augustus Johnston, one of the school s founders, had purchased a slave for his unusual knife skills. This slave, Nemo (“no man”) would become an unacknowledged member of the surgical faculty by day and by night, a “resurrectionist,” responsible for procuring bodies for medical study. An unforgettable character, by turns apparently insouciant, tormented, and brilliant, and seen by some as almost supernatural, Nemo will seize his self-respect in ways no reader can anticipate.

With exceptional storytelling pacing and skill, Matthew Guinn weaves together past and present to relate a Southern Gothic tale of shocking crimes and exquisite revenge, a riveting and satisfying moral parable of the South.”