Ebook: Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

In Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture, Anthony Wilson examines the relationship between the ecological history of the Southern swamp and the evolution of Southern culture from the colonial era to the present. To early European colonists and to the plantation elite, the swamp was a place linked with sin and impurity, and a practical obstacle to agricultural development. For many of those excluded from the white southern aristocracy—African Americans, Native Americans, Acadians, and poor, rural whites—the swamp meant something very different, providing shelter and sustenance, and offering separation and protection from the dominant plantation culture. This book explores the interplay of contradictory but equally prevailing metaphors: first, the trope of the swamp as the underside of the myth of pastoral Eden that defined the antebellum South; and second, the more recent figuration of the swamp as the last pure vestige of un-dominated but ever-threatened southern eco-culture. As the South comes to look more and more like the rest of America, colonized by the relentless progress of strip malls and suburban sprawl, southern wooded wetlands have come to embody the last part of the South that will always be beyond cultural dominion. Shadow and Shelter charts this transformation as reflected in literary works as varied as William Byrd II’s History of the Dividing Line and Linda Hogan’s Power, as well as in films, legislation, personal memoirs, and the tourist industry. Examining the southern swamp from a perspective informed by ecocriticism, literary studies, and ecological history, Shadow and Shelter considers the many representations of the swamp and its evolving role in an increasingly multicultural South.