The cavalier and the economist: southern historical romance -- Sketching the 1830s cotton boom: southwestern humor -- The southern imperial dream: novels of adventure -- Narratives of reform: the proslavery social problem novel -- "Free labor" and the free market: slave narratives.
Summary:
Moving beyond earlier accounts of antebellum writing from the South, Katharine A. Burnett?s 'Cavaliers and Economists' argues that the development of southern literature occurred in tandem with the region?s economic modernization. This study identifies an elaborate network of transatlantic literary exchange, operating concurrently with the region?s economic expansion, in which southern writers adopted popular British genres, such as the historical romance and the seduction novel, as models for their own representations of the American South. Through a series of comparative readings, Burnett reveals how southern writers like Augusta Jane Evans, Maria McIntosh, and William Gilmore Simms reworked familiar literary forms to represent the ideological pulls of modern capitalism?namely laissez-faire principles and an investment in the free market?alongside the pre-capitalist structures of the plantation that characterized American slavery and the South prior to the Civil War. 'Cavaliers and Economists' reveals how authors created southern literature in relation to global free market capitalism, and in the process, repeatedly re-negotiated and re-justified the institution of slavery.
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