European Journal of American Culture - Volume 26, Issue 2, 2007

In re-mapping the United States South, it is important to pay attention to the economic force that established the region as a global presence cotton: its growth, its processing and its international market value. The international cotton market informs southern writer William Faulkner's work, especially his essay Mississippi, both materially and metaphorically as a powerful political, economic and ecological presence that simultaneously establishes the South's exceptionalness while also inscribing it on national and international political maps.

The New Orleans that emerges from George Washington Cable's 1888 collection, Strange True Stories of Louisiana is effectively a Caribbean city as much as a US one, and European imprints are strong in both these strands of identity. Cable acts ostensibly as a collector of remarkable factual accounts of New Orleans and Louisiana, but his own narrative presence is at least as strong as the original tellers and characters of the tales themselves. While constructing a more or less chronological overall narrative of the city and the wider region(s), Cable presents a multitude of voices merging and clashing with each other, blurring lines of fact and fiction as they blur boundaries of identity. In these tales, as often poignant and tragic as they are melodramatic, Cable shows the many truths of New Orleans to be strange indeed, and emphasises its status as a nodal point in relations within and between old and new worlds.

This article recounts, briefly, the affinities that previous critics have drawn between William Faulkner and William Butler Yeats, and suggests their shared architectural sensibility as a new medium for assessing their individual literary consciousnesses in parallel. This sensibility finds play in the Big Houses of both of these authors' works: Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom, Absalom! and the marvelous empty sea-shell of the palatial manor in Yeats's Meditations in Time of Civil War. The anxiety surrounding these structures' potential destruction in both of these authors' works, I argue, is less directed towards the threat of their physical annihilation than towards the dialectic model of history itself: the threat of destroying the house becomes the threat of destroying the very notion of teleology, of effacing the structural sum of history. I perform separate studies of two Big Houses from which these authors drew their architectural inspiration: for Faulkner, Rowan Oak in Oxford, MS and for Yeats, Lissadell in County Sligo, Ireland. The manners in which these houses grant and restrict access to their occupants, I argue, suggest ideals that are more divergent than these authors' mutual anxieties, the mutual and manifold hybridities of their domestic spaces, might indicate.

Southern hospitality first existed as a narrowly defined body of social practices among the antebellum planter classes, but it also exists as discourse, as a meaning-making story continually told and re-told about the South. This discourse has its own historicity divorced from historical origins and social practice. The 1964 exploitation film Two Thousand Maniacs is examined to illustrate how far this discourse has traveled from its origins and to reveal the inherent tension between the ethical ideals of hospitality and the discourse of southern hospitality. Gesturing toward an idealised image of the past, the discourse of southern hospitality has been one of the main tropes through which non-southerners have imagined their relationship with the region, and at the same time, it has been an important vehicle for self-definition among southerners. The film's ironic re-signification of southern hospitality suggests this discourse merely masks a legacy of thus-far unresolved regional conflicts and resentments.