Lynne Tatlock
Washington University in St. Louis
Doug Knox
Washington University in St. Louis
Steve Pentecost
Washington University in St. Louis
Lynne Tatlock, Steve Pentecost, and Doug Knox propose to present their (preliminary) findings on the circulation, contents, and genres of novels about the American South in the Muncie Public Library, 30-35 years after the end of the Civil War and approximately 20 years after the end of reconstruction. We propose to follow the methods our team (plus Matt Erlin) employed in Lynne Tatlock, Matt Erlin, Douglas Knox, and Stephen Pentecost, “Crossing Over: Gendered Reading Formations at the Muncie Public Library, 1891-1902,” Journal of Cultural Analytics, 3.22.18, namely to study and connect readers (demographic information and book selections) and texts. We have identified 131 pertinent titles of novels with southern contents amounting to 185 circulating books. A preliminary look indicates that the borrowers of these novels fall into groups marked by gender and age and that the southern-themed novels they selected in turn can be grouped by genre, contents, and views of the south. We propose to focus in particular on selections favored by adults, which loom larger in the last five years of circulation data. We are interested in identifying and tracing the presence in these novels of elements signaling the complex of ideas associated with the “Lost Cause” according to genre, tropes, and themes and in turn correlating these data with the selections of library patrons. Perhaps needless to say, the presence or absence of textual representations of African Americans will play a critical role as may more generally the vocabulary deployed in depictions of landscapes, social relations, and built environments in differentiating these novels from others present in the library. We intend to present a descriptive account of circulation and texts and hope thereby to speculate on what Muncie circulation data can tell us more generally about the diffusion of cultural myths via novels and their genres.