Examining a range of little magazines published across the Southern states between 1921 and 1945, The Serial South is the first full-length study of literary magazines during the Southern Renaissance. It explores how Southern magazines responded to and emulated the cosmopolitan little magazine, widely regarded as central to the modernist movement, and analyzes what the formal features of the periodical--seriality, ephemerality, the potential for global circulation, readerships and their dialogues with a magazine--can tell us about Southern identity and its changes during the first half of the twentieth century. Round argues that the discourse networks of the little magazine offered a testing ground for Southern editors to see what kinds of Southern identity could coexist with both national and cosmopolitan identities.

Offering pioneering close readings and detailed archival research, The Serial South proposes a new theory of Southern intellectual and cultural history by drawing together periodical studies and Southern studies.