Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature by Jennifer Rae Greeson

This book examines the relationship between the United States and the South through three distinct periods: the early Republic, the antebellum, and Reconstruction. Although Greeson contends that this relationship changes in each of those periods (in the first, the South is the nation's colonial other, in the second, the South becomes a repository for concerns about modernization, and in the third, the South is a place for Empire to start), this relationship always contains elements of what the US wants both to embrace and to disavow. The book is meticulously researched and contains brilliant readings of canonical and less-familiar texts.