Southern Spaces

On September 19 and 20, 2003, the Seventeenth Southern Writers Symposium, organized around the theme of "Region," was hosted by Methodist College in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The occasion provided the scholars who now make up the Editorial Board of Southern Spaces with an excellent opportunity to advance their "cornerstone" missions: providing a location for discussions about Southern place and space and offering a variety of means through which to map diverse, often oppositional, always shifting delineations of the South's boundaries - ideological and mythological as well as geographical. The idea of an inaugural web forum made up of contributions from the scholarly gathering in Fayetteville came to fruition as Symposium participants were invited to submit their papers to be considered for posting with Southern Spaces. Scholars John Shelton Reed and Jon Smith, who were keynote speakers at the Symposium, made the final selection of the four papers that are presented below. We acknowledge with gratitude the energy and care with which they made their decisions. We also wish to thank Professor Emily Wright of Methodist College, the Conference Director, for giving us this opportunity and providing indispensable editorial oversight and review.

The papers that were selected prove that the southerner's faith in potluck church suppers might also apply to undertakings such as this one: the contributions to the repast combined serendipitously to produce a wonderful blend, as though the whole menu had been carefully pre-ordained.

The four papers that we present here are integral to Southern Spaces' effort to make available an array of new tools that will allow scholars to expand their ideas — concerning how and where they can meet as well as how and what they can discuss — in their pursuit of the contours that constitute the range, but not the limits, of the South.

The Mere Region by Robert Jackson

"Bad Politics": Old Southwestern Humor and the Southern Gothic in Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory by Edward Shannon

From Upper Hogthief, Georgia, to “Fait,” Alabama: Regionalism in Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes and Hooper’s Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs by Adam Tate

Magical Realism and the Mississippi Delta by Art Taylor