This book explores how an eclectic selection of narratives and images of the American South have been created and consumed. The thirteen essays move beyond both traditional accounts of southern identity as either declining or enduring, and more recent postmodernist accounts of the South as imagined or invented. Instead, the contributors emphasize how narratives and images of "the South" have real social, political, and economic ramifications, and that they register at various local, regional, national, and transnational scales.

Featuring distinguished scholars writing from a wide range of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives―history, literary studies, performance studies, popular music, and queer studies―the volume both challenges and expands on established understandings of how, when, where, and why ideas of the South have been developed and disseminated.