Rethinking the South

Bringing together Michael O'Brien's essays on the American South, this book examines the persistence and vitality of southern intellectual history from the early 19th century to the present day. At once a broad survey of southern thought and a meditation on the subject as an academic discipline, ""Rethinking the South"" integrates social history, literary criticism and historiography as it positions the South within the wider traditions of European and American culture. In his introduction and throughout the ten essays that follow, O'Brien stresses the tradition of Romanticism as a central theme, binding together figures as disparate as critic Hugh Legare, literary scholar Edwin Mims, poets Richard Henry Wilde and Allen Tate, and historians W.J. Cash and C. Vann Woodward.