In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Shreve McCannon asks his Harvard roomate, Mississippian Quentin Compson, to "Tell about the South": "What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all." In this module, we will explore the contrasting ways that those questions have been answered - and, indeed, still continue to be answered - by Southerners and others. Reading widely in Southern literature, we will witness the emergence of a distinct Southern literary identity in the years before the Civil War; consider the effect of slavery on the development of Southern letters; encounter, through Reconstruction and beyond, the effects of defeat, liberation and memory; meet the flowering of the Southern Renaissance; and trace the development of Southern writing through the Civil Rights Era and beyond, up to the present day. But we will also consider a variety of other Southern cultures - music, particularly, from country to hip-hop, but also film and television - and think about the ongoing representations of the South by outsiders. And throughout, we will question the shifting meaning of "the South", and consider its persistent significance in the twenty-first century.