SOURCE: Turner, Arlin. “Dim Pages in Literary History: The South Since the Civil War.” In Southern Literary Study: Problems and Possibilities, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and C. Hugh Holman, pp. 36-47. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

In the following essay, Turner comments on the diversity of the American South, and on the need for further study of lesser Southern authors of the post-Civil War period.

It would be possible, I suppose, to speak of the American South and mean only a portion of the globe bounded by such and such coordinates of longitude and latitude. I sometimes say to a class or seminar in southern literature that the course owes its existence and its bounds to convenience only—that world literature, or American literature, cannot be studied in one piece, and that southern literature is a plausible unit for separate study. But the...