Books by Charles Reagan Wilson

From the late nineteenth-century invention of southern tradition to early twenty-first-century folk artistic creativity, Wilson examines a wide range of cultural expression, including music, literature, folk art, media representations, and religious imagery.

Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity. Out of defeat emerged a civil religion that embodied the Lost Cause. This book states that the Lost Cause version of the regional civil religion was a powerful expression.

Religion has permeated nearly every aspect of modern southern culture, with results that range from portraits of Jesus on black velvet to the soul-stirring orations of Martin Luther King Jr. This work makes an appraisal of religion's influence on such expressions of regional life as literature, music, and folk art.