Notes Toward an Iconography of Regional Landscape Form: The Southern Model

Abstract

If we accept the fact that the American South has in many respects functioned as a cohesive cultural region, it may be useful to explore the possibility that specific regional landscape forms in some measure reflect a shared value system. An examination of the body of criticism addressing regional themes in Southern literature—particularly that of a vanished “Golden Age” of agrarian civilization centered in plantation life—suggests that there have indeed been prevailing myths of Southern life and experience that may have found analogous expression in the forms of the built environment. An effort to understand the elements that comprise the Southern mythos in its various permutations is a first step toward adding an iconographic dimension to our analysis of the regional landscape typology.