Driven to the Field - (American South) by David A Davis

About the Book

"By analyzing literary treatments of sharecropping in multiple genres of Southern literature, Driven to the Field reveals how the South progressed from slavery to civil rights, how this form of tenant farming continues to influence southern culture, and why labor exploitation defines Southern culture"--

Book Synopsis

Driven to the Field traces the culture of sharecropping--crucial to understanding life in the southern United States--from Emancipation to the twenty-first century. By reading dozens of works of literature in their historical context, David A. Davis demonstrates how sharecropping emerged, endured for a century, and continues to resonate in American culture. Following the end of slavery, sharecropping initially served as an expedient solution to a practical problem, but it quickly developed into an entrenched power structure situated between slavery and freedom that exploited the labor of Blacks and poor whites to produce agricultural commodities.

Sharecropping was the economic linchpin in the South's social structure, and the region's political system, race relations, and cultural practices were inextricably linked with this peculiar form of tenant farming from the end of the Civil War through the civil rights movement. Driven to the Field analyzes literary portrayals of this system to explain how it defined the culture of the South, revealing multiple genres of literature that depicted sharecropping, such as cotton romances, agricultural uplift novels, proletarian sharecropper fiction, and sharecropper autobiographies--important works of American literature that have never before been evaluated and discussed in their proper context.

Review Quotes

Shining a light on the labor histories we would often rather ignore and providing re-appreciation of a wide range of texts that have thus far gone sorely undervalued, Driven to the Field refuses to allow us to ignore sharecropping anymore.-- "Mississippi Quarterly"

Comprehensive and well argued, Driven to the Field moves comfortably among disciplines as diverse as literature, politics, economics, history, sociology, and the visual arts to explore a subject that has been 'hiding in plain sight' for far too long. Enriching our understanding of how the South continues to shape our national narrative, Davis ably charts the rise and fall of an exploitative labor system whose vestiges remain with us today. The past is indeed prologue.

--Christopher Metress, Samford University, Author of The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative

With the end of sharecropping during the twentieth century, cultural production about the South has become decidedly more urban and modern. In this marvelous journey through more than a century of cultural representations of sharecropping, David Davis shifts our attention back to this exploitative, violent institution. He offers readers a much-needed reminder of how large sharecropping once loomed in the lives of southerners, and how much the racism, inequality, and poverty it engendered linger today.

--Adrienne Monteith Petty, College of William & Mary

About the Author

David A. Davis is Associate Professor of English at Mercer University and the author of World War I and Southern Modernism.