BILL HARDWIG, Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900 (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2013), 184 pp. MARK J: NOONAN, Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870-1893 (Kent: KentState UP, 2010), 235 pp. WALDEMAR ZACHARASIEWICZ, CHRISTOPH IRMSCHER, eds., Cultural Circulation: Dialogues between Canada and the American South, Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Klasse 843 (Wien: VÖAW, 2013), 398pp.

Bill Hardwig, Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900 (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2013), 184 pp.  Mark J. Noonan, Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870-1893 (Kent: KentState UP, 2010), 235 pp.  Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Christoph Irmscher, eds., Cultural Circulation: Dialogues between Canada and the American South, Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Klasse 843 (Wien: VÖAW, 2013), 398pp. Amerikastudien/ American Studies 60.2/3   Few subfields of American studies have profited as much from recent perspectival changes and methodological developments in the discipline, such as the transnational turn or Periodical studies, as the field of Southern studies has. The three books under review here all look at the U.S. South through the lenses of either “new Southern studies” (Zacharasiewicz’s and Irmscher’s Cultural Circulation) or Periodical studies (Noonan’s Readingthe Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine) or a combination of the two (Hardwig’s Upon Provincialism), and the insightful and illuminating readings of literature and culture from and about the South offered in these volumes clearly demonstrate how these new approaches have, each in its own way, revitalized and invigorated Southern studies.             New Southern studies, perhaps the more prominent of the two, can be traced back to the early 2000s. In the preface to a special issue of American Literature on “Violence, the Body and ‘the South’” (2001), Houston A. Baker Jr. and Dana D. Nelson coin the term “new Southern studies” and call for a “complication of old borders and terrains [as well as] wishes to construct and survey a new scholarly map of ‘The South.’”[1] More special issues in the same spirit followed, among others in the Southern Quarterly (2003), the Mississippi Quarterly (2003-2004), the South Central Review (2005), and again in American Literature (2006). In the latter journal, guest editors Kathryn McKee and Anette Trefzer respond to Baker Jr.’s and Nelson’s call by giving the new Southern studies an explicitly transnational orientation,[2] thus bringing it in line with the rest of the discipline. The transnational turn in new Southern studies is also reflected in the titles of a number of essay collections (e.g. Jon Smith’s and Deborah Cohn’s Look Away: The U.S. South in New World Studies, 2004) and monographs (e.g., James L. Peacock’s Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World, 2007), some of which appeared in the newly established series “New Directions in Southern Studies” and “The New Southern Studies” by UNC Press and the U of Georgia Press, respectively. The work of scholars such as Patricia Yaeger, Michael Kreyling, Scott Romine, and Martyn Bone has complemented these efforts by more generally interrogating and deterritorializing the idea or myth of the U.S. South.            ...