The subversive South : genre-play, aristocratic ideology, and antebellum Southern literature

This study of the literature of the antebellum South attempts to challenge the accepted notion that portrays the Old South\u27s literature as nothing more than propaganda for the aristocratic planter class, in its attempt to justify their social status and defend the institution of slavery. My study examines the reductive view of antebellum southern literature as a body of historical romances and plantation novels written by conservative,aristocratic writers. Then, I interrogate this traditional view by closely examining the work of five writers, James Heath, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, John PendletonKennedy, and E. D. E. N. Southworth, all of whom challenge the dominant ideology of the Old South in their fiction. This subversion of aristocratic values is effected by the authors\u27 struggle against or experimentation with the popular genres of the historical romance and the plantation novel. The first chapter explores Heath\u27s use of the historical romance to attack the aristocracy rather than to justify it. The second chapter explores slave writer Douglass\u27s appropriation of the white genre of historical romance in his work wherein he makes a slave the hero and the slave-owners the villains. The third chapter examines Poe\u27s complete rejection of the romance in favor of the horror genre, a move that subverts planter ideology because it openly announces the fears and anxieties that the southern aristocracy has about their slaves and women. The fourth chapter moves toKennedy\u27s Swallow Bam, usually considered the prototypical plantation novel, to illustrate that within this work is a generic struggle between romanticism and realism that calls into question many of the region\u27s myths. The final chapter treats another writer, Southworth,who has been linked to the plantation tradition, to illustrate that within her fiction sheappropriates the conventions of the pro-slavery novel in order to make a subtle abolitionistargument. Through this series of investigations into the work of antebellum southernVIwriters, both canonical and obscure, I illustrate that there was indeed a subversive Southbefore the Civil War, actively trying to change its society through its fiction