Cover; Half-title; Series Page; Title page; Copyright information; Table of contents; Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; Introduction; Notes; 1 The World the Reviewers Made; The Playing Field; The Players ... ; ... And the Scorecards; The Game; Notes; 2 The Cultural Economy of Reading in the Interwar Years; The Geography of Reading; Can You Talk about Books?; Keeping Up with the Van Dorens; Readers Write Back; Notes; 3 The South Meets Harlem; The Grotesque Glamour of Catfish Row; Something about Mary; A New Type of Fiction?; Swan Songs; Notes; 4 Confronting Jim Crow
An Exhibition of SeamsEnter Mr. Rylee; Exit Mr. Meade; The Rebirth of Gabriel and the Death of Uncle Tom; Notes; 5 Away Down South in the Land of Problems; An Opus for Dixie; Purveyor of the Grotesque; Lecherous as Monkeys; Beside Addie's Coffin; Dixie's Millions; Notes; 6 A Class of Burden-Bearers; Where Are the Cotton Mills, and the Murder of Ella May and Her Songs?; Taking a Stand in Dixie; The Latest and Most Unrelenting Recruit in a Literary Battalion of Emancipation; The Very Tang and Texture of the Southeast; Notes; 7 The Most Audacious Book Ever Written by Southerners
The Typewriter AgrariansCalling All Liberals; Culture below the Potomac; Notes; 8 Fiction Fights the Civil War; What a Bad Time to Bring Out a Novel; Sympathy without Prejudice; A Masterpiece of Pure Escapism; The Vanquished; Notes; Epilog; Notes; Index
Summary
An examination of the literary marketplace's central role in creating the Southern Literary Renaissance