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How Faulkner, Welty, Lytle, and Gordon reimagined and reconstructed the Native American past in their work. In this book, Annette Trefzer argues that not only have Native Americans played an active role in the construction of the South’s cultural landscape—despite a history of colonization, dispossession, and removal aimed at rendering them invisible—but that their under-examined presence in southern literature also provides a crucial avenue for a post-regional understanding of the American South. William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Andrew Lytle, and Caroline Gordon created works about the Spanish conquest of the New World, the Cherokee frontier during the Revolution, the expansion into the Mississippi Territory, and the slaveholding societies of the American southeast. They wrote 100 years after the forceful removal of Native Americans from the southeast but consistently returned to the idea of an \"Indian frontier,\" each articulating a different vision and discourse about Native Americans—wholesome and pure in the vision of some, symptomatic of hybridity and universality for others. Trefzer contends that these writers engage in a double discourse about the region and nation: fabricating regional identity by invoking the South’s \"native\" heritage and pointing to issues of national guilt, colonization, westward expansion, and imperialism in a period that saw the US sphere of influence widen dramatically. In both cases, the \"Indian\" signifies regional and national self-definitions and contributes to the shaping of cultural, racial, and national \"others.\" Trefzer employs the idea of archeology in two senses: quite literally the excavation of artifacts in the South during the New Deal administration of the 1930s (a surfacing of material culture to which each writer responded) and archeology as a method for exploring texts she addresses (literary digs into the textual strata of America’s literature and its cultural history).

[...]inher- ent in the Southern Gothic genre is a reexamination of the plantation as generat- ing the darkness, death and decay that shapes the South, and a reevaluation of the place of women, homosexuals, and peoples of color, whose domination contrib- uted to this haunted geography (Tunc, \"Sexuality\" 153). Much like Gordon herself, Catherine no longer \"considers the rural South as a place of refuge. [...]The Women on the Porch . . . presents the final decay of the agrarian tradition,\" and the message that southerners cannot rely on the fam- ily farm as a landscape of \"consolation for the tragic circumstances in their lives\" (Perdue).

A close, complementary relationship exists between Robert Penn Warren's early political and literary ideologies. As a member of the conservative Southern Agrarians, Warren was suspicious of the changes wrought by modernity and was committed to maintaining traditional forms of social order, as seen in his early support of segregation in the South. Warren's early aesthetic principles were driven by similar desires. Faced with the disorder of the modern world, Warren opted to pursue Eliot's aesthetic program of tradition, authority, order, and control. Selections from Warren's early poetry, criticism, and letters reveal that the boundaries between his political and literary ideologies were very fluid during this period. But as Warren's political perspectives--particularly his views on race--began to change in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he began to question his aesthetic assumptions as well, leading him into a decade-long impasse during which he published no new poetry.

Caroline Gordon authored two novels specifically about the Civil War and its impact upon the plantation class in the South, Penhally and None Shall Look Back. She most fully engages the feminine image at the center of the Agrarian myth in the earlier work, in which she probes the cultural implications of the southern white woman's symbolic connection to the land, and explores the fate of that symbolism in a New South seemingly characterize more by urban industrialism than by rural agrarianism. LeRoy-Frazier critiques Gordon's Penhally.

Elie discusses the life of Dorothy Day, who led the Catholic Workers movement for 16 years. He considers how her memoir was received by literary critics and by the Catholic community.