Bøger af Charles Reagan Wilson

Since the eighteenth century, a range of thinkers, artists, writers, and critics have wrestled with the notion that something distinct characterizes life in the American South. But in this sweeping new intellectual and cultural history, Charles Reagan Wilson reveals that there has never been a singular understanding of this 'southern way of life'.

From the late nineteenth-century invention of southern tradition to early twenty-first-century folk artistic creativity, Wilson examines a wide range of cultural expression, including music, literature, folk art, media representations, and religious imagery.

Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity. Out of defeat emerged a civil religion that embodied the Lost Cause. This book states that the Lost Cause version of the regional civil religion was a powerful expression.

Religion has permeated nearly every aspect of modern southern culture, with results that range from portraits of Jesus on black velvet to the soul-stirring orations of Martin Luther King Jr. This work makes an appraisal of religion's influence on such expressions of regional life as literature, music, and folk art.