Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920-1941

Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920-1941 offers a fascinating take on American literary culture during the interwar years by turning attention to critics and their book reviews instead of authors and their novels. Using startling statistics about purchasing patterns-for example, of all book purchases in the United States in 1938, 30 percent were in New York whereas just 7.12 percent occurred in the eleven states of the former Confederacy-she establishes how interwar southern literature became an export good, feeding readers' appetites for "exotic and foreign locales" (p. 17). To give her readers a taste of Malcolm Cowley's style, for instance, Gardner offers colorful selections from Cowley's review of Gone with the Wind (1936), which, among other zingers, credits the 1,037-page novel with including "'every last bale of cotton and bushel of moonlight'" to paint a picture of "'Southern female devotion working its lilywhite fingers uncomplainingly to the lilywhite bone'" (p. 274).