The South has never been a real space in the imaginations of authors from colonization-forward. From early works from the colonial era to the wave of Afrofuturist texts of the past several decades, the South has been a space of alternative realities, a site of speculation upon which authors projected imagined presents and futures. The “otherness” of the South has always lent the region a speculative bent in the United States and global imagination. This essay examines literature from the antebellum South itself, the supposedly geographically fixed monolith of plantation culture. Written by a majority white, proslavery authorship, southern imaginative writing before the Civil War always speculated on the “South” and shaped it as a cultural identity. To understand the endurance and widespread influence of the dominant versions of “South,” it is necessary to examine their literary origin point and not just the aftershocks and reverberations. Like writing about the South, writing from the South during the nineteenth century was always a speculative exercise, made especially evident when focusing on works by those invested in continuing an idea of “South” that lay the foundation for ideologies circulating long after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War.

This introduction achieves three goals. First, the essay offers readers a brief account of the differences between the old southern studies andNew Southern Studies, with a particular focus on race. Second, the piece examines how the New Southern Studies requires a different type of literary historical narrative, one which emphasizes pluralism and multiplicity more than homogeneity and cohesion.Third, it provides an overview of the twenty-four essays included in the volume.

While I’ll Take My Stand is a terrible book by any standard of argumentation, it belongs in a history of the literature of the U.S. South because virtually the entire history of mainstream southern studies, literary and otherwise, is based on a distorted and selective reading of that Agrarian manifesto. The past ninety years’ profoundly opposed receptions of I’ll Take My Stand inside and outside of southern studies are thus ultimately much more significant than the book that prompted the receptions. Virtually all the critiques of old southern studies offered by the so-called new southern studies have been regularly made by scholars and critics outside the field since the manifesto appeared; conversely, even today, much allegedly “progressive” southernist scholarship continues to promulgate Agrarian ideals that romanticize the land, tradition, and the rural.