If at First You Don't Secede, Try, Try Again: Southern Literature From Fenimore Cooper to Faulkner.

Defines Southern literature along the themes of Civil War, secession, states' rights, and the broader cultural antagonisms between sections. The Yankee threat to Southern agrarianism has been a prevalent theme well into the 20th century, though the foundations for this theme are in the work of New Yorker James Fenimore Cooper, whose celebrations of "the Yorker tradition of agricultural baronies . . . gave literary mandate to the positive depiction of plantation life.