If the Bildungsroman is defined by its allegorical schema in which youth becomes the “symbolic form” of capitalist modernity, as Moretti argues (5), and if it is the geographical logic of nationhood that puts “the brakes” on youth's boundless development in the genre, as Esty has addended (5), then what shape does youth's development take when it is contoured by the geographical imaginary of a regionalism popularly distinguished by its stubborn anti-modernization? Ever lurking at the peripheries of the imagined nation, the twentieth-century South has historically been imagined not only as a site of antidevelopment—as might align with Esty's hypothesis regarding the colonial imaginary of the Anglo-European modernists as issuing narratives of arrested development—but also one of economic underdevelopment. Those socioeconomic “characteristics” that distinguished region from nation were shared “with formerly colonial, underdeveloped peripheries around the globe” (Greeson 3). In both U.S. and world history, the South's story of underdevelopment has metonymized “broader narratives of the Western journey into modernity,” Jennifer Rae Greeson observes (4). Literary accounts that projected “the South as premodern and undeveloped” also served a “forward-looking function,” by delivering “a domestic site upon which the racialist, civilizing power of U.S. continental expansion and empire abroad may be rehearsed and projected” (4). In the early twentieth century, the South formed a geographic medium—part myth, part reality—onto which the uneven temporalities of national destiny and capitalist modernity could be projected, reinforcing the official narratives of nation-formation.

Many complex layers appear within that region's story of underdevelopment, which this present chapter shall briefly rehearse before proceeding in the following two chapters to the question of how these conditions influenced the regional transformations of the Bildungsroman. Between 1900 and 1960, unprecedented technological interconnectedness, on the one hand, meant media scrutiny documented the region's actual underdevelopment in terms of education, poverty, and civil rights relative to other parts of the nation. Yet on the other hand, the political trope of Southern regional underdevelopment also provided the liberal nation-state with the means to rationalize the racism, imperialism, and 100% Americanism that accompanied national expansion and development.