Artists and writers from the colder climes of northern Europe have long felt the lure of the South of the continent. Goethe was revitalised by his encounters with Mediterranean culture on his journey to Italy. Nietzsche took flight to the south to begin his life anew. D H Lawrence sought the health-giving southern sun in Sicily and Sardinia.

Over many years, other versions of the South have also held their own fascination. The South Seas cast a spell over writers like Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, and painters like Paul Gauguin. The American Deep South had (and has) its own, particular literary tradition. The white empty spaces of the frozen South of Antarctica were filled by the fantasies of writers like Edgar Allan Poe and H P Lovecraft. Even London south of the river is a place where novelists like Angela Carter and Michael Moorcock have staked out literary territory.

Moving between geography and mythology, literature and history, this is the first book to look at all things Southern in one volume. It examines the South as a symbol of freedom and escape, the South as the location of Northern visions of Utopia, and the South as the imagined site of decadence, poverty and backwardness. From Tahiti to the streets of Peckham, from Naples to New Orleans, Merlin Coverley's brilliant and wide-ranging study throws light on how and why the idea of the South, in all its forms, has come to exert such a powerful hold on our imaginations.