Title: The artificial Southerner
First published: 2001
Description: "The Artificial Southerner tracks the manifestations and ramifications of "Southern identity" - the relationship among a self-conscious, invented regionalism, the real distinctiveness of Southern culture, and the influence of the South in America. In these essays columnist Philip Martin explores the region and those who have both fled and embraced it.

He offers lyric portraits of Southerners real, imagined, and absentee: musicians (James Brown, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash), writers (Richard Ford, Eudora Welty), politicians (Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter). He also considers such topics as the architecture of E.

Fay Jones, the biracial nature of country music, and the idea of "white trash." "Every American has a South within," he says, "a conquered territory, an old wound ... a scar." His work meditates on the rock and roll, the literature, the life, and the love which proceed from that inner, self-created South."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Civilization, Group identity, Intellectual life, Popular culture, Biography, History, Popular culture, southern states, Southern states, intellectual life, Southern states, biography
Places: Southern States
Time periods: 20th century, 1865-
LC classification: F216.2 .M37 2001