Book contents
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Fictions of the Native South
- Chapter 2 John Smith and the English Origins of Southern Exceptionalism
- Chapter 3 Plantation and Enlightenment
- Chapter 4 Geoconfederacy
- Chapter 5 In the Shadow of His Office
- Chapter 6 Shadows of Haiti
- Chapter 7 “Midnight Bakings” Amid Starvation
- Chapter 8 A Calculated Fiction
- Chapter 9 Maroons and Marronage in Antebellum African American Literature
- Chapter 10 Everyday Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century
- Chapter 11 Fables of the Bloody Shirt
- Chapter 12 A Heritage Unique in the Ages
- Chapter 13 Moonlight and Magnolias No More
- Chapter 14 Women Writers and the Southern Renaissance; or, the Work of Gender in Literary Periodization
- Chapter 15 Southern Geographies and New Negro Modernism
- Chapter 16 “A fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA”
- Chapter 17 Provincialism as a Positive Good
- Chapter 18 Faulkner’s Untimely Fiction
- Chapter 19 Reconsidering Du Bois’s “Central Text”
- Chapter 20 Cultural Activism and Theater of the Civil Rights Movement
- Chapter 21 Till the Hurt Becomes Music
- Chapter 22 Undead Sound
- Chapter 23 There Is No South
- Chapter 24 Hurricane Alley
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 13 - Moonlight and Magnolias No More
The New Plantation Tradition and Its Respondents
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2021
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Fictions of the Native South
- Chapter 2 John Smith and the English Origins of Southern Exceptionalism
- Chapter 3 Plantation and Enlightenment
- Chapter 4 Geoconfederacy
- Chapter 5 In the Shadow of His Office
- Chapter 6 Shadows of Haiti
- Chapter 7 “Midnight Bakings” Amid Starvation
- Chapter 8 A Calculated Fiction
- Chapter 9 Maroons and Marronage in Antebellum African American Literature
- Chapter 10 Everyday Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century
- Chapter 11 Fables of the Bloody Shirt
- Chapter 12 A Heritage Unique in the Ages
- Chapter 13 Moonlight and Magnolias No More
- Chapter 14 Women Writers and the Southern Renaissance; or, the Work of Gender in Literary Periodization
- Chapter 15 Southern Geographies and New Negro Modernism
- Chapter 16 “A fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA”
- Chapter 17 Provincialism as a Positive Good
- Chapter 18 Faulkner’s Untimely Fiction
- Chapter 19 Reconsidering Du Bois’s “Central Text”
- Chapter 20 Cultural Activism and Theater of the Civil Rights Movement
- Chapter 21 Till the Hurt Becomes Music
- Chapter 22 Undead Sound
- Chapter 23 There Is No South
- Chapter 24 Hurricane Alley
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This essay exams southern literature from the end of Reconstruction through the first decade of the twentieth century. Specifically, this essay seeks to contextualize authors like Thomas Dixon, Jr. and Thomas Nelson Page and their nostalgic revisions of the idea of the plantation in southern literature. In their works, Dixon and Page seek to present the South as emblematic of a great Lost Cause, one that was rooted in (to them) a magnificent past, where hierarchical race relations were made abundantly clear. To this end, this essay also examines contemporaneous black authors like Charles Chesnutt and Sutton Griggs (whose novel The Hindered Hand is a direct response to Dixon). Ultimately, by re-centering our focus of this era of southern literature to also encompass the black writers whose mission was to combat white supremacy, we gain a broader and clearer understanding of southern literature in the wake of Reconstruction.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South , pp. 215 - 226Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021