With over 100 pages of original content, we are dedicated to offering quality information about America’s southern authors, and their works. Peruse our excellent book reviews on new southern novels as well as the classics of southern literature.
In addition, we invite you to browse our comprehensive bookstore linked to Amazon.com, including critical essays and biographies of southern authors, as well as a collection of southern travel, southern culture, architecture, photography, history and of course southern cooking!
What Makes Southern Literature Southern?
Southern literature is
defined as literature about the South, written by
authors who were either brought up in the South,
spent many years in the
South, or came from southern parents. ... But
exactly where does the "South" begin and end?
Geographically, the South can reach as far west as
Missouri,
Oklahoma and
Texas, and as far North as
Kentucky and
Virginia. Characteristics of southern literature are: the
significance of family, a sense of community and
one’s role within it, the community's dominating religion and
the burden religion often brings, land
and the promise it brings, and the use of southern
dialect. History is held in
high regard in the South, and so, the historical
significance of the southern town is often discussed at length
in works of southern literature. [read more]
Featured Southern Author
"Brevets to Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp who have once
again discerned and eliminated a weak spot in southern literary
scholarship, this time in the Flannery O'Connor sector. Stemming
from a superb group of scholars, the essays published here do not
gloss over the sordidness endemic to O'Connor's fictional world;
rather they examine its citizens, who have made their world sordid
by denying that it has its roots in God's creation."—Lewis A.
Lawson, University of Maryland, from Inside the Flap.
Featured Southern Book
Draper's latest novel is a work of historical fiction that imagines a
15-year-old African girl's journey through American slavery. The
story begins in Amari's Ashanti village, but the idyllic scene burst
into bloodshed when slavers murder her family. Amari and her
beloved, Besa, are shackled, and so begins the horrific and
humiliating journey from slave fort, the Middle Passage, and then
auction on American shores, where a rice plantation owner buys Amari
for his 16-year-old son's sexual enjoyment.
Southern Literary Review -- your source for the finest southern literature from the most talented southern authors.
