Review: Shadow and
Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture
By
Anthony Wilson
Reviewed
by Kathy Piselli
Atlanta-Fulton Public
Library, USA
Anthony
Wilson. Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in
Southern Culture Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 232
pp. ISBN: 1-57806-804-5 (cloth) $US45.00
Shadow and Shelter:
The Swamp in Southern Culture mixes literary history, folk history and
popular culture with literary analysis. If you can get past the academic tone
you will find fun material as author Anthony Wilson, Assistant Professor of
English at LaGrange College and self-described "conservationist and
cultural critic," travels through time to illustrate the changing meaning
of the swamp in American culture. His focus is literature, but he covers film
and broader cultural and political issues as well. He looks at the swamp from
the point of view of different populations: the southern white aristocracy,
southern African-Americans, Creoles, Cajuns, and southern Native Americans.
Early
attitudes toward swamps were colored by what can only be called regional
chauvinism. There are many swampy places along the Atlantic seaboard, but while
a northern swamp might be a pretty cranberry bog, southern swamps were thought
of as malarial and frightening. The same negative viewpoint, though, meant
different things to different people: wealthy opportunists sought to buy low,
then drain swamps for economic benefit, while the dispossessed - slaves,
Indians, and poor whites - sought to hide in them.
Four
literary periods are considered, starting from the dawn of the southern U.S.
identity, to the "Postmodern" at the dawn of the modern environmental
movement. The reader finds that attitudes toward the swamp continue through
history to follow or shape southern culture. To illustrate the
colonial/antebellum period, Wilson uses both southern and non-southern writers,
both fiction and expository writers. Because some of his examples are obscure,
this will be a fascinating chapter for anyone interested in the shaping of
early southern identity.
For
the Civil War period, Wilson includes many war testimonies, including those
from the prisoner of war camp at Andersonville, Georgia. The south becomes
romanticized, as the noble savage did in the colonial period - admired in
defeat. Wilson also devotes some time here to the New Orleans literary scene
and to the important southern writer Sidney Lanier.
In
the 20th century, the swamp is still a refuge, but not a place of
exile. Indeed, writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Lillian Smith, and William
Faulkner are proud of their swamps as places to express their own rejection of
the dominant American culture.
Finally,
in the postmodern period, "Bubba" environmentalists seeking to save
the wetlands also seek in their way to save a unique culture, and the author
traces this angle through some modern writings as well as cultural phenomena
like swamp tours. There are many illustrative articles that could follow from
that last chapter. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
Kathy
Piselli, <kathy.piselli@fultoncountyga.gov>,
Government Documents Depository, Atlanta Fulton Public Library, One Margaret
Mitchell Sq Atlanta, GA 30303, USA. TEL 404-730-1914.
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Electronic Green
Journal,
Issue 25, 2007
ISSN: 1076-7975