Patterns of adaptation : place and placelessness in contemporary Southern fiction / Victor A. Kramer -- On devotion to the ̀communal order' : Wendell Berry's record of fidelity, interdependence, and love / Stephen Whited -- Redeeming Blackness : urban allegories of O'Conner, Percy, and Toole / Lucinda H. MacKethan -- Rural identity in the Southern gothic novels of Mark Steadman / Molly Boyd -- Character before the bar : John Ehle's The widow's trial / Terry Roberts -- Let us now praise the other : women in Lee Smith's short fiction / William M. Teem IV -- The violent bear it as best they can : social conflict in the novels of Harry Crews / Robert C. Covel -- "Go with what is most terrifying" : re-inventing domestic space in Josephine Humphreys' Dreams of sleep / Elinor Ann Walker -- Suburban culture, imaginative wonder : the fiction of Frederick Barthelme / Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.