It is a curiosity of modern scholarship that the only general work on antebellum Southern Romanticism is Rollin G. Osterweis' Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, which has been in print since 1949, is still read, and still –if only for want of a competitor –used. Yet much has changed in understanding of the social and intellectual history of the Old South, and even more of the phenomenon of Romanticism. These changes, natural enough over the span of two intellectual generations, have made many of that book's presumptions questionable; so a second look at the problem seems worthwhile, to clear the ground and to indicate fresh directions. For Osterweis wrote within the assumptions of the 1940s about the nature and shortcomings of Romanticism. He was guided by Irving Babbitt, who scorned Romanticism as a puling and exaggerated passion instigated by Rousseau, a disaster for rational men: at best silly, as with the jousts of antebellum Virginia; at worst dangerous, as with the secession convention of South Carolina. But Osterweis was Babbitt with a difference. While Babbitt and, more weightily, Ernst Cassirer had thought that Romanticism had led the world astray and it was still astray, with Hitler the avatar of Hegel as chilling evidence, Osterweis cheerily regarded Romanticism as a movement that had expired with the nineteenth century, a fossil safe to mock. To this perspective, largely adopted from Jacques Barzun's Romanticism and the Modern Ego (1943), Osterweis added the view of Arthur Lovejoy, who had insisted that Romanticism, while possessing a core notion of diversity and flux, should most safely be regarded as multiple: there were Romanticisms, not a Romanticism.

If a pregnant woman in the United States wishes to terminate her pregnancy, she may do so unimpeded by the state during the first trimester of the pregnancy, so long as the termination is performed by a registered medical practitioner. In the second trimester, she must have closer consultation with her physician than in the first three months, but the choice of an abortion still resides with her. State interest in that period may be concerned only with the safety of the procedure for the mother since abortion during the second trimester is more life-threatening to the mother than in the first. Only in the last trimester of her pregnancy does the state interest in that choice become paramount because the state finds itself in the position of being advocate for the foetus which, in thelater stages of pregnancy, may be viable outside of the mother's womb.

Chicken-farmer, shoe-worker, bobbin-boy, messenger, teacher, journalist, leather-worker, poet, student, cultural ambassador, berry-picker, lecturer. Such a list does not even exhaust Robert Frost's occupations, let alone his ambitions. In fact, when he writes in “Two Tramps in Mud Time” that

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight

it is tempting to see here a sly joke at his own expense. For Frost had so many vocations and avocations that they are well-nigh impossible to combine in any clear-sighted unity. “No poet in this century has written more poems involving more different kinds of work than Frost,” writes William H. Pritchard, before going on to list some of the jobs which Frost found and abandoned between 1885 and 1892. Even the many jobs he did do were insufficient to content him. “I should have been an archaeologist,” he wrote to A. J. Armstrong in 1943 and though Frost as an extremely successful poet might allow himself that ironic wistfulness, he was not being merely whimsical. If some of his family were drawn into the darker sides of his poetry, then they also enacted a few of his brighter dreams. Welcoming Willard E. Fraser as a new son-in-law in 1932, Frost proposes not one but four desired careers.

Classic works of fiction almost always raise “penetrating questions about the foundations and effects of the political regime, i.e. human nature and its implications for society.” But popular fiction, too, can be an instrument of social and political understanding. As Gore Vidal has argued:

Writers of fiction, even more than systematic philosophers, tend to reveal unconscious presuppositions. One might even say that those writers who are the most popular are the ones who share the largest number of common assumptions with their audience, subliminally reflecting prejudices and aspirations so obvious that they are never stated and, never stated, never precisely understood or even recognized. John O'Hara is an excellent example of this kind of writer.

Writing in her autobiography about Southern fiction at the turn of the century, Ellen Glasgow argued that it needed more violence and toughness to counteract its tendency towards “insidious” sentimentality; as she defined it later, such literature could be redeemed only by “Blood and irony.” Nearly fifty years later, she might have been gratified to see how a fellow Southern woman writer had answered this need. Violence and irony are endemic in O'Connor's short stories, which depict brutality, physical abuse, murder, and betrayal perpetrated by characters who are often termed “grotesques” –physical freaks, idiots, and maniacs. But they owe their striking impact not only to the violence which they embody in terms of character and event, but also to the violence which they enact on the reader. They implement a shock technique, dependent not so much on the nature of the fictional material, whose horrorsare objectified by a skilfully controlled comic/ironic tone, as on exploitation of the reader's preconceptions.The disjunctions of the stories, which "work," in O'Connor's words, by portraying "an action that is totally unexpected,"are reproduced in the reader's subjection to an abrupt shattering of expectation, producing a profound sense of unease or bewilderment. Thus the most exceptional and original aspect of the violence in O'Connor's fiction is found in its manipulative relationship with the audience who,as one critic has expressed it, may feel "cheated,"4 not to say victimized,by the author's mocking tyranny.

Social scientists collected many, many American Indian autobiographies during the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, autobiographies of Apaches, Navajos, Hopis, Zunis, Papagos, Kiowas, Sioux, a Kwakiutl, autobiographies of shamans, shepherds, hunters, farmers, men, and women. Many of these are now moldering in the dark reaches of forgotten file cabinets, but a remarkable number were published, and for this we must be grateful. These narratives are to us a legacy, affording us some sense of what it means to see the world and the self according to ancient habits of mind.