Ordering the Facade

“Succeeds brilliantly in leading the way for future examiniations of the 'New South.'” — Southern Humanities Review

“Innovative in its hybridity, its interweaving of the visual and the literary.” — Journal of Southern History

“Contemporary writing by southern women emerges vividly in Henninger’s analysis. . . . [Henninger] joins others in challenging the constrictions of southern women and so changing the meaning of southernness itself.” — Tiger Weekly

“From start to finish a notably strong and stimulating contribution to literary and cultural studies of the American South.” — Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature

“To reveal the power of the visual in the ‘oral’ South, Henninger serves up a feast of texts, photos, and fresh new ideas. Her main course presents the way southern women writers have engaged southern visual culture by writing ‘fictional photographs.’ This book represents what’s best about the nouvelle cuisine that is the new southern studies.” — Anne Goodwyn Jones, author of Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936

“Interdisciplinarity at its best, Katherine Henninger’s Ordering the Facade applies a concern with cultural and literary history to visual representations of the U.S. South and to fictional photographs by southern women. The satisfying result is an exhilarating realignment of word and image, gender and memory, power and place in reading contemporary southern women’s fiction and a dynamic refocusing of critical attention to the visual legacies of southern culture. Katherine Henninger produces a smart twenty-first century take on reading the South; she reframes the iconography of a dominant male gaze in historical representation with the iconoclastic word work of women seeing and signifying differently.” — Thadious M. Davis, University of Pennsylvania