Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture by Anthony Wilson An
examination of the swamp's role in southern cultural, literary, and
ecological history. 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, the swamp
was a place linked with sin and impurity. To the plantation elite, it
was a practical obstacle to agricultural development. For the many
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 swamp as the underside of the myth of pastoral Eden that defined the
antebellum South; and second, the swamp as the last pure vestige of
undominated southern wilderness. As the South gives in to strip malls
and suburban sprawl, its wooded wetlands have come to embody the last
part of the region resisting assimilation. 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. Anthony Wilson is assistant
professor of English at LaGrange College.
