Our South : geographic fantasy and the rise of national literature / Jennifer Rae Greeson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Greeson, Jennifer Rae.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--Southern States--History and criticism.

National characteristics, American, in literature.

Nationalism in literature.

Nationalism and literature--United States--History.

Nationalism and literature.

Southern States--In literature.

Southern States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 356 p. ) ill., maps

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This work tracks the nation/South juxtaposition in US literature from the founding to the turn of the 20th century, through genres including travel writing, gothic and romance novels, geography textbooks, transcendentalist prose, and abolitionist address. Since the birth of the nation, we have turned to stories about the American South to narrate the rapid ascendency of the United States on the world stage. The idea of a cohesive South, different from yet integral to the United States, arose with the very formation of the nation itself. Its semitropical climate, plantation production, and heterogeneous population once defined the New World from the perspective of Europe. By founding U.S. literature through opposition to the South, writers boldly asserted their nation to stand apart from the imperial world order. Our South tracks the nation/South juxtaposition in U.S. literature from the founding to the turn of the twentieth century, through genres including travel writing, gothic and romance novels, geography textbooks, transcendentalist prose, and abolitionist address. Even as the southern states became peripheral to U.S. politics and economy, Jennifer Rae Greeson demonstrates that in literature the South remained central to the expanding and evolving idea of the nation. Claiming the South as our deviant and recalcitrant "other," Americans have projected an anti-imperial imperative of domesticating and civilizing, administering and integrating underdeveloped regions both within our borders and beyond. Our South has been a primal site for thinking about geography and power in the United States.

Contents:

Introduction : magnet South

Nationalization / The Plantation South

The problem of the plantation

Putting the colonial past in its place

Domestic possession and the imperial impulse

The enemy within

Industrialization and expansion / The slave South

Underwriting free labor and free soil

American universal geography

Dark satanic fields

The masterwork of national literature

The question of empire / The Reconstruction South

Abandoned lands and exceptional empire

The glory of disaster

Internal islands and the American scene, 1898/1905.

Notes:

Formerly CIP.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674059351

0674059352

OCLC:

709593060