Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History

by Michael O'Brien

Bringing together Michael O’Brien’s pathbreaking essays on the American South, this book examines the persistence and vitality of southern intellectual history from the early nineteenth century to the present day. At once a broad survey of southern thought and a meditation on the subject as an academic discipline, Rethinking the South deftly integrates social history, literary criticism, and historiography as it positions the South within the wider traditions of European and American culture.

In his thoughtful introduction and throughout the ten essays that follow, O'Brien stresses the tradition of Romanticism as a central theme, binding togethere figures as disparate as critic Hugh Legare, literary scholar Edwin Mims, poets Richard Henry Wilde and Allen Tate, and historians W. J. Cash and C. Vann Woodward.

First published as a collection in 1988, these essays confirm O’Brien’s position as a pioneer in establishing and defining the enterprise of southern intellectual history.

288 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1988

About the author

Various authors, various genres (not disambiguated)

Reviews

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

After an analysis of C. Vann Woodward themes and ideas on the late nineteenth-century South, O’Brien concludes that “the house of Woodward may have peeling paint, the odd room may be unusable, but it is still the only hotel in town worth the price” (p.205)