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In William Faulkner’s novel, “Absalom, Absalom,” a Canadian says to his college roommate from Mississippi: “Talk about the South.”

Two recently published books talk about it in depth and they talk about it well, revealing surprising facts and insights.

A UNCG graduate, Karen Cox, who is now on the faculty of UNC-Charlotte, shows in “Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture” (UNC Press, Chapel Hill; 2011, 224 pages, hardcover $34.95) how cultural forces outside the region created and romanticized it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Jennifer Rae Greeson, a Duke graduate on the University of Virginia faculty, builds a case in “Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature” (Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London; 2010, 356 pages, hardcover GET PRICE) for how the South was central to the conception of an expanding United States from its founding to the early 20th century even as it was a distinctive “other” in the culture and a sideshow in its politics and economy.

The South, both say, is more than a place defined by climate and geography; it’s a cultural construct. As such, it has served the nation since its founding in surprising ways. For instance, Greeson says it helped shape how we came to think of what it means to be an American. Cox points out that the South since the Civil War has been a great marketing tool.

Cox says Southerners didn’t define the South in popular culture. Yankees did. When you think about it, this is obvious. The book and magazine publishing industry is New York City, Boston, Philadelphia. Movies are made in California. The giant advertising agencies are New York and Chicago. Tin Pan Alley and Broadway? New York City. Radio and TV networks? You get the picture.

The North defined the South to address a cultural need, Cox says. What was the need? Escapism. A way to vent the tensions and frustrations of modernism as the country changed from a rural society to an industrial one, she says. Rural people were displaced and crowded into dirty, crime-ridden cities across the Northeast and Midwest.

The South created in popular culture – minstrel shows, novels, magazines, movies, music, advertising, radio and TV – was preindustrial. Full of moonlight and magnolias, it was gracious living at a slower pace in a bucolic setting. Think “Gone With the Wind.” When the novel hit the stores, it was marketed as an accurate picture of the ante-bellum South, the literal truth about happy days on the plantation.

In this construct, which began to unravel only with the advent of the civil rights movement, African Americans were subservient to whites. Minstrel shows performed by whites in blackface created racial stereotypes that became strongly ingrained in popular culture. Stock characters such as “Jim Crow” and “Zip Coon” became standard depictions of blacks in movies, radio and eventually, television.

The most popular radio show of all time, “Amos ‘n Andy,” an NBC comedy about blacks in Chicago, was based on minstrel stereotypes, she notes. Interestingly, she points out that Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the white performers who created the show, met in Durham. Annoying, she gives no further details about this meeting.

The J. Walter Thompson advertising agency made Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour “the most recognizable icon of American advertising in the twentieth century,” Cox writes. “The black mammy and uncle caricatures appealed to white consumers nationwide, because the image often conveyed blacks as loyal employees who willingly too care of their white employers.”

This racial stereotyping in popular cultured hindered race relations in the country and helped institutionalize racism in the culture, Cox says.

White Southerners didn’t escape stereotyping in novels, movies and music either. The lazy, ignorant, moonshine-swilliing hillbilly was created. Southern white women, by and large, were portrayed as genteel and subservient to the man of the house, er, plantation.

The popular television series, “The Beverly Hillbillies,” carried the stereotype forward into the 1960s. The notion of passive femininity, women as objects for men to admire, was used by advertising agencies to sell skin creams, lotions, shampoos and all manner of beauty products.

This is an easily accessible, eye-opening and richly documented study. What really sets the book off are the advertisements, photographs, sheet music and movie stills that she has uncovered and included.

Greeson’s book is not an easy read but it is the more provocative. It burrows deeply into American political and literary culture, which she argues are closely bound. This is a heavyweight of a study, impressively learned and exhaustively researched.

She puts it this way: “I do not ask what the South is; rather I ask what it is good for, what it accomplishes and enables in the broader culture of the United States.”

If there is a short answer to her question, it goes something like this summation from the introduction: “As an internal other from the start of U.S. existence, it (the South) lies simultaneously inside and outside the national imaginary constructed in U.S. literature. Our South thus serves in that literature as an unparalleled site of connection between “the United States” and what lies outside it – a connection to the larger world, to Western history, to a guilty colonial past and a desired and feared imperial future.”

Got it? This is not to be dismissive. You need to come to this book with considerable background. I don’t have it but you sense this is an important book.

Fred Hobson, the noted scholar of the South at UNC, writes “This is one of the most insightful works of Southern literary and intellectual history of the past two decades – and its significance transcends the U.S. South.”

Well, I’m not going to argue with him.