<p>To early European colonists the swamp was a place linked with sin and impurity; to the plantation elite, it was a practical obstacle to agricultural development. For the many excluded from the white southern aristocracy--African Americans, Native Americans, Acadians, and poor, rural whites--the swamp meant something very different, providing shelter and sustenance and offering separation and protection from the dominant plantation culture. <p> <i>Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture</i> explores the interplay of contradictory but equally pre-vailing metaphors: first, the swamp as the underside of the myth of pastoral Eden that defined the antebellum South; and second, the swamp as the last pure vestige of undominated southern eco-culture. As the South gives in to strip malls and suburban sprawl, its wooded wetlands have come to embody the last part of the region that will always be beyond cultural domination. <p> Examining the southern swamp from a perspective informed by ecocriticism, literary studies, and ecological history, <i>Shadow and Shelter</i> considers the many repre-sentations of the swamp and its evolving role in an increasingly multicultural South. <p>Anthony Wilson is assistant professor of English at LaGrange College. His work has been published in the <i>Southern Literary Journal</i> and the Chronicle of Higher Education's online edition.