Community cookbooks operate through a rhetoric of place as ways of thinking about belonging and influencing communal identities. They reveal much about a community, including the sharing of memories and tradition, geographical identification, and representation of socio-cultural hierarchies and habits. For that reason, this paper advances the claim that the discourse and visuality in community cookbooks, specifically the cookbooks 200 Years of Charleston Cooking, Charleston Receipts, and Charleston Receipts Repeats published during the height of a renaissance in Southern literature, influenced the identity of “Southerness” which, taken in conjunction with place, space, and time has resulted in a unification of the changing American South. Using Carolyn Miller’s notions of genre criticism on the basis of genres as social movements, community cookbooks qualify for the genre label of domestic literature in terms of content and rhetorical influence. To prove my claim, the use of images, recipes, and folklore within the pages are analyzed with five a posteriori themes that discuss relations between a sense of place and its foodways. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection