What is Southern?

When we think about what defines the South, we often start with geography. But which South do we mean? The South as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau? The states that formed the Confederacy? Or the South as Southerners themselves understand it?

At its core, Southern literature is a literature obsessed with the question of who counts as Southern—and on what terms. Allen Mendenhall writes that “at a certain level of generality Southern literature consists of themes befitting any setting: family, community, race, poverty, language, cuisine, morality, religion, change, a sense of place and the burden of history.” August W. Staub similarly argues, “a governing concern of Southern literature is with identity, the identity of the individual as a Southerner and the identity of Southerners—black and white, rich and poor, urban and rural—as a group and as a culture.” Allen Tate located its origin in the region’s relationship to its own past, arguing that “that backward glance gave us the Southern renascence, a literature conscious of the past in the present,” and went further to insist that this rootedness wasn’t a limitation but a requirement: “no literature can be mature without the regional consciousness; it can only be senile, with the renewed immaturity of senility.” For Tate, a Southern writer’s identity is inseparable from a specific, defeated history pressing on the present moment.

This understanding leaves room for books that may not seem Southern at first glance. Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, for example, is a work of speculative fiction that never even names Florida, yet its mysterious landscape, inspired by North Florida’s St. Marks Wildlife Refuge, is absolutely central to the work. Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain tells the stories of Vietnamese immigrants in Louisiana, bringing Vietnamese history and culture into the Southern literary tradition. Southern fiction can be about immigrants, outsiders, environmental disasters, or worlds far removed from the familiar images of the South.

The South has never been one thing, and neither has its literature.