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C. Vann Woodward A Southern Historian and His Critics. Ed. by John Herbert Roper. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. xviii, 347 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-8203-1876-0. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-8203-1877-9.)
The best way of characterizing the relationship between C. Vann Woodward, now in his ninetieth year, and historians of the postbellum South is Harold Bloom's concept of "the anxiety of influence." In his practice and his presence, Woodward has created and, then, presided over a mature southern historiography. Woodward was profoundly shaped by the New Deal ethos of his early adulthood, fascinated by the failed Populist project of Georgia's Tom Watson, and seasoned by the chastened atmosphere of the Cold War United States. The result has been a body of work that, as his friend Richard Hofstadter once wrote of Charles Beard's controversial work on the Constitution, an adult mind can respect. Overall, the Woodward era has witnessed southern historiography's move from sectional patriotism to regional critique, from provincial celebration to an ambivalent confrontation with the South's past, from a monumentalist to a critical mode of historical self-consciousness. Besides Perry Miller on New England intellectual and literary history, it is hard to think of another post-New Deal American historian who has so defined and dominated his or her chosen field.
All this is confirmed by C. Vann Woodward a collection of essays (or review essays), all but one previously published, assessing Woodward's work. The volume is organized into six sections: Woodward's formal and rhetorical approach to writing history, particularly his emphasis upon irony; the issue of continuity versus...