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. Book 59)

Over the past generation the Deep South has become the primary focus, and the plantation the predominant site, in southern literary studies. These developments followed academic interest first in postcolonial studies and more recently in globalization studies and conceptions of the Global South. With The North of the South Barbara Ladd turns her attention to the Upper South, exploring the fluidity of regional boundaries in this part of the world. In so doing she argues for greater attention to the impact of its distinctive ecosystems on its literature and points out the complex ways the Upper South's cultural and natural histories are foundational for our national imaginary. Surprisingly, it is Edgar Allan Poe who anchors this study. No longer American literary nationalism's most famous misfit, here he is shown to be remarkably attentive to both the natural and the nationalizing world around him, to have engaged deeply and critically with the environmental and the nationalist vision of Thomas Jefferson. Poe left a legacy of national melancholy around questions of American origins and possible futures discernible in the Souths of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison. In her examination of these cultural aspects of the Upper South, Ladd plumbs the depths of Poe's influence on southern literary studies. "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"-- Provided by publisher