I'd recommend Ayers, Maxine, and Pineapple. They've all been good producers for me and fire blight free.
They have great flavor and you can decide how crisp you want them by how long you leave them on the tree.
Pineapple is self fruitful. Ayers is also, but will be more productive with pollination from Maxine. The two will pollinate each other. Since Pineapple is an early bloomer, it won't pollinate the other two.

Rayrose,
Ayers is pollen sterile according to the folks at Corvallis. Sweet tree. http://www.ars-grin.gov/cgi-bin/npgs/acc/search.pl?accid=%20PI+541722
I also think Dabney, a sister from the same program, will do well too. I saw both at raintree also.

There's a good nursery in GA, Isons; I bet they would know

Johnson Nursery, also in GA, seems to have a good selection of pears especially suited to the Southeast. Edible Landscaping also seems to have made good selections in its offerings for the Southeast, even though there's not a lot of variety overlap between the two nurseries.

Ayers is not pollen sterile. Mine pollinates itself. It's even advertised by Johnson's Nursery, where I bought mine, as being
partially self fruitful. It was the first variety that I planted, and it pollinated itself, and became more fruitful after I planted Maxine.

Just Fruits and Exotics has an assortment of southern pears too.

Say gonebananas, you're in 7/8 like the original poster and myself; what are your favorite pears? How did the Douglas pear work out?

Thanks,

You could also look at Legg Creek Farms. They are based in East Texas but they sell trees that do good in the south here so they should grow good in your area.

In the next few years I should learn a lot about what pears do well here, but in terms of fruiting not quite yet.

I have about 35 different selections that at least have a chance "on the way" so to speak.

Here in Dallas, I'll always grow a Keiffer. But posters either love Keiffers, or hate them

I believe a variety can be both pollen sterile and self fruitful, via parthenocarpy, which I also believe to be a common ability of pears. Usually this creates seedless fruit but apparently not always, according to the text book in my lap (my brain isn't functional enough to hold onto words like parthenocarpy).

Parthenocarpy in pears apparently relies on warm conditions during early fruit development (according to Childers in "Modern Fruit Science") and a great many varieties are capable of it. I don't believe such pears tend to be smaller or more sparse on a tree than pollinated fruit as long as weather is favorable.

It used to be fairly common for growers in CA of Bartlett pears to plant orchards without pollinators, so in the right site there may be no advantage to having compatible pollen around with many pear varieties.

The fact that this is a weather dependent phenomena may lead to a lot of the confusion about what varieties are self fruitful. In the south you are more likely to have warm conditions during fruit development than in the north, I believe.