Dangerous Innocence

Drawing on a diverse range of texts, William P. Murray brilliantly examines the U.S. South as a space key to licensing and sustaining national fantasies of white innocence. In analyzing the 'southern outsider' figure, Dangerous Innocence offers a relevant and compelling case for how region mediates individual and collective understandings of history, race, and power." - Lisa Hinrichsen, author of Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature

"Murray's analysis and historicization of southern literature and television deftly maps the trajectory that deployments of white innocence carved through the past six decades. An incredibly timely and immensely necessary contribution to southern studies, literary studies, critical race and whiteness studies, and more." - Ryan Sharp, assistant professor of English, Baylor University

"The vast archive of this book—from seemingly banal midcentury television to post-9/11 prestige literature—demonstrates a curious continuity in the fictive conversation about race in America: a promised reckoning that never quite arrives. Murray refuses that deferral, effectively staging the conversation through accessible, generous prose." - Jennie Lightweis-Goff, author of Blood at the Root: Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus