pt. 1. Allen Tate, Flem Snopes, and the last years of William Faulkner -- Flannery O'Connor, sin, and grace: Everything that rises must converge -- Historical novelist and the existential peril: Robert Penn Warren's Band of angels -- Katherine Anne Porter: the glories and the errors of her ways -- Southern novelists and the Civil War -- pt. 2. In time of the breaking of nations: the decline of Southern fiction -- New Faustus: the Southern renascence and the Joycean aesthetic -- Southern writers in the modern world: death by melancholy.