This introduction achieves three goals. First, the essay offers readers a brief account of the differences between the old southern studies andNew Southern Studies, with a particular focus on race. Second, the piece examines how the New Southern Studies requires a different type of literary historical narrative, one which emphasizes pluralism and multiplicity more than homogeneity and cohesion.Third, it provides an overview of the twenty-four essays included in the volume.

While I’ll Take My Stand is a terrible book by any standard of argumentation, it belongs in a history of the literature of the U.S. South because virtually the entire history of mainstream southern studies, literary and otherwise, is based on a distorted and selective reading of that Agrarian manifesto. The past ninety years’ profoundly opposed receptions of I’ll Take My Stand inside and outside of southern studies are thus ultimately much more significant than the book that prompted the receptions. Virtually all the critiques of old southern studies offered by the so-called new southern studies have been regularly made by scholars and critics outside the field since the manifesto appeared; conversely, even today, much allegedly “progressive” southernist scholarship continues to promulgate Agrarian ideals that romanticize the land, tradition, and the rural.