Postmodern southern literature: Confessions of a Norton Anthologist

[Editor's note: Professor Andrews is the new President of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature and General Editor of The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology. The following is a lecture he gave at the 2000 Modern Language Association convention.]

Given the lurid tone of my title, I think the first thing I should do is just to confess and get it over with. So-after reflecting on all our work on the planning, editing, copyediting, promotion, and reception of The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, I want to say publicly: "I don't hate it. I don't hate it. I don't."

There: I've said it, and I feel a whole lot better.

Of course there were moments in the creation of this anthology when I did envision some of my teachers and mentors from my graduate school years at UNC-Chapel Hill twitching and turning unquietly in their graves over the version of southern literary history that would emerge from this anthology. I confess that I still do feel twinges of guilt over the unholy birth of this book. It was conceived, I admit, on foreign soil-that is, in a Jamaican restaurant in Palo Alto, California. It was the brain-child of a renegade white southerner-me-who had come to southern literature via black, rather than white, writers and whose apostasy was confirmed by my residence, while the anthology gestated, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences-not even at a respectable humanities center but at a social sciences think tank-at Stanford. My unfitness to serve as general editor of this project was quite clear to one unnamed editor at W W. Norton, who stated in an in-house memo that only now can be fully declassified: "I love the idea of this [anthology]. [But] I have a small problem with the lead editor [being from] a non-Southern School (the U of Kansas) with his specialty obviously being African American literature." I was all set to send the Norton staff my 86-page, single-spaced, personal essay on why I was still a southerner despite never having taught at a southern university up to that time, but Julia Reidhead, the vice president at Norton who first suggested I take a bite of this anthology apple, said, Don't worry. I did as Julia recommended, not only because she is smart, savvy, and clearly wanted to do the anthology, but also because she had an assistant named Tara Parmiter, whose first name seemed prophetic to me of the success of this undertaking. I also took heart from the fact that, although Julia Reidhead was at Norton, the embodiment of northern literary taste and Yankee publishing hegemony, she had spent her formative years absorbing southern culture-learning, in fact, to ride horses-in northern Virginia. Seizing on this as an undeniable sign of the gentility with which I, the descendant of humble dirt farmers in central Virginia, had finally managed to affiliate myself, I willingly signed the contract for this anthology, ignoring the evidence that Julia Reidhead, the editorial godmother of this anthology, made her home unashamedly in the bowels of Manhattan itself. And Tara-alas, she's gone with the wind, having left Norton soon after the publication of the anthology for graduate school at NYU.

With that genealogy, what else could I call it but a postmodern southern literature anthology, despite the fact that I get the heebie-jeebies every time I utter the p-word? It's undoubtedly post-modest of me to confess here, but, still, I might as well, that when Julia first asked me in the fall of 1994 if I thought Norton should undertake an anthology of southern literature, I told her yes, unequivocally-and then said I'd get back to her about the reasons why. Frankly, I didn't know exactly what kind of southern literature anthology Norton, or any other national publisher, ought to consider. To be utterly frank, I didn't even know exactly what southern literature was anymore.

I took some comfort from the fact that, in 1985, when introducing The History of Southern Literature, Louis Rubin made little attempt to define what was southern about southern literature or even what made it aesthetically distinctive. This represented a remarkable turn away from the approach taken by T. D. Young, Floyd C. Watkins, and Richmond Croom Beatty, whose anthology, The Literature of the South (1968), was the first southern literature anthology I had read in graduate school. In his foreword to The Literature of the South, Randall Stewart leads off with a lengthy portrait of "the genuinely Southern writer" and goes on from there to characterize southern traditions-namely, "tidewater" and "frontier," "classical" and "romantic"-before explaining why the South's "separateness" from the rest of the nation had given it a noteworthy literary tradition (xviii). In 1979, however, when Louis Rubin brought out his own anthology, The Literary South, he said almost nothing about how to spot a "genuinely Southern writer" or what traditions characterized southern writing or the South. In 1985, Louis introduced The History of Southern Literature by stating simply that there had been and still was such a thing as "Southern identity," although he didn't try to define it. Because of that more or less self-evident truth, Louis claimed it was still worthwhile to study what he called "the habit of viewing one's experience in terms of one's relationship to that entity" that Louis called "the South" (5). This was as far as Louis went in claiming something distinctive or peculiar in southern literature.