In books such as The Dispossessed Garden and The Brazen Face of History, Lewis P. Simpson has outlined - and in large part defined - the southern literary imagination. The Fable of the Southern Writer expands upon his previous work as it contemplates the drama of the literary self in quest of its historical identity.

Written over the past decade, the eleven essays in this collection have as their centering theme a search for the autobiographical motive in southern fiction and criticism. Simpson directs his focus in these essays, which are more meditative than argumentative, from a variety of angles, to suggest that the impulse and vision of the southern writer derive from the same tension that has gripped modern writers in general: the effort to grasp and interpret the relationship between the self and history.

Simpson ponders the role of the self as literary artist attempting to confront and order a desacralized world, a world in which everything and everybody, every aspect of nature and human consciousness, has with the advent of science taken on purely historical dimensions.

Considering a broad spectrum of writers - including Thomas Jefferson, John Randolph, Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Arthur Crew Inman, William Styron, and Walker Percy - ten of the essays address the larger question of what it means to be a writer of the American South in the modern world - the world of science and history that has forever replaced the world of myth and tradition.

Not expecting or even seeking to resolve this question, Simpson nonetheless considers its centrality to, for example, Faulkner's imaginative involvement in the history of his own environs, suggesting his work may be read as the complex autobiographical fable of the modern literary artist in the South.

Integral to Faulkner's, Warren's, and many other southern writers' definition of self, Simpson explains, is the image of a lost homeland. In later twentieth-century writers of the South, however, this image, with the accompanying tension between the love of home and the necessity of exile, has gradually yielded to the universal modern phenomenon of memory's alienation by history. The memoiristic essay that concludes the volume offers an implied comment on this phenomenon.

The Fable of the Southern Writer is a distinguished accomplishment in critical thinking. These essays cover significant ground in Lewis P. Simpson's continuing quest to define the image of the writer as self-conscious southerner.