A future student of the modern canon of Southern literature might reasonably conclude that, whatever else Southern writers were preoccupied with, politics was not among them. This would be all the more puzzling, since the major concern of Southern writers between World War I and roughly 1970 was arguably the weight and power of the past. But how is it possible to have a history (or history in general) without politics, narrative without action? Is the South so aberrant that one of Western culture's central categories of experience—politics—has been largely absent? Or are Southern writers such an eccentric breed that they have all but ignored an entire dimension of human experience?

This is not to say that Southern literature is bereft of a wide range of human experiences. Young men and women leave the South, then look homeward with great longing; brothers fall in love with sisters, with themselves, and with death; other men even fall in love with cows and corpses, while crippled bookish young women fall in love with treacherous Bible salesmen; weddings are celebrated in the Delta, while wars are satirized and memorialized; houses and barns are