The Southern Way of Life - by Charles Reagan Wilson (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Since the eighteenth century, a vast range of thinkers, artists, writers, and critics have wrestled with the notion that something distinct characterizes life in the American South. But in this sweeping new intellectual and cultural history, Charles Reagan Wilson reveals that there has never been a singular understanding of this 'southern way of life.' Considering nearly three centuries of regional expression in history, literature, music, recreation, religion, and more, produced by those inside and outside the region, Wilson argues that the consciousness associated with the American South is best understood by examining three related yet discrete ideas that have evolved over time: southern civilization, the southern way of life, and southern living. The story he tells is not of an essential South but of one marked by contestations, contingencies, and change"--

Book Synopsis

How does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life--a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the American South in national and global contexts, celebrated historian Charles Reagan Wilson assesses how diverse communities of southerners have sought to define the region's identity. Surveying three centuries of southern regional consciousness across many genres, disciplines, and cultural strains, Wilson considers and challenges prior presentations of the region, advancing a vision of southern culture that has always been plural, dynamic, and complicated by race and class.

Structured in three parts, The Southern Way of Life takes readers on a journey from the colonial era to the present, from when complex ideas of "southern civilization" rooted in slaveholding and agrarianism dominated to the twenty-first-century rise of a modern, multicultural "southern living." As Wilson shows, there is no singular or essential South but rather a rich tapestry woven with contestations, contingencies, and change.

Review Quotes

"[Charles Reagan Wilson] knows all there is to know about Southern culture, and then some. His 1,600-page half-tonne truck of a book, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), was a landmark work that, in this 600-page epic, has found its narrative partner . . . . He ranges across the full story, from fine oratory to racial epithets, from great literatures to two-dime records, from classical mansions to juke joints . . . . Wilson has spent his life turning the South from something not forgotten into something born again."--The New Statesman

"An impressive and elucidating work of cultural history"--Publishers Weekly

"This book is a masterful study . . . . engaging, enlightening, and deeply relevant--an impressive and fitting accomplishment for Wilson's already storied career."--The Civil War Monitor

"Timely and essential. . . . Cross-Border Cosmopolitans is convincingly driven by a premise, that of the need to 'excavate, recover and reconstruct' the history of the African diaspora in North America which Adjetey argues is an important part of the history of the Atlantic world."--Ethnic and Racial Studies

"What makes this book a commanding work of scholarship is the subtlety of Wilson's exploration of the centuries-long evolution of regional identity, its engagement with questions of authority, and its adaptation to changing social and economic conditions. . . . This work, the product of a distinguished career, powerfully shows that southern cultures and identities remain vital scholarly subjects."-North Carolina Historical Review

"Wilson, the dean of southern studies, has given us a monumental interdisciplinary and multicultural reassessment of a fabled and oft-troubled region. This study will force a recalibration of old pieties while charting a path toward new forms of social and cultural critique."--John Wharton Lowe, author of Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature