Driven to the Field

David A. Davis is Associate Professor of English at Mercer University and the author of World War I and Southern Modernism.

Shining a light on the labor histories we would often rather ignore and providing re-appreciation of a wide range of texts that have thus far gone sorely undervalued, Driven to the Field refuses to allow us to ignore sharecropping anymore.-- "Mississippi Quarterly" Comprehensive and well argued, Driven to the Field moves comfortably among disciplines as diverse as literature, politics, economics, history, sociology, and the visual arts to explore a subject that has been 'hiding in plain sight' for far too long. Enriching our understanding of how the South continues to shape our national narrative, Davis ably charts the rise and fall of an exploitative labor system whose vestiges remain with us today. The past is indeed prologue. --Christopher Metress, Samford University, Author of The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative With the end of sharecropping during the twentieth century, cultural production about the South has become decidedly more urban and modern. In this marvelous journey through more than a century of cultural representations of sharecropping, David Davis shifts our attention back to this exploitative, violent institution. He offers readers a much-needed reminder of how large sharecropping once loomed in the lives of southerners, and how much the racism, inequality, and poverty it engendered linger today. --Adrienne Monteith Petty, College of William & Mary