Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature

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......Page 8 List of Illustrations......Page 10 Introduction: Magnet South......Page 14 Part One - Nationalization / The Plantation South......Page 30 1. The Problem of the Plantation......Page 32 2. Putting the Colonial Past in Its Place......Page 55 3. Domestic Possession and the Imperial Impulse......Page 77 4. The Enemy Within......Page 104 Part Two - Industrialization and Expansion / The Slave South......Page 126 5. Underwriting Free Labor and Free Soil......Page 128 6. American Universal Geography......Page 158 7. Dark Satanic Fields......Page 182 8. The Masterwork of National Literature......Page 206 Part Three - The Question of Empire /The Reconstruction South......Page 238 9. Abandoned Lands and Exceptional Empire......Page 240 10. The Glory of Disaster......Page 265 11. Internal Islands and the American Scene, 1898–1905......Page 286 Notes......Page 304 Acknowledgments......Page 362 Index......Page 364 Our South offers a provocative new interpretation of the literature of the South within the literary and political history of the United States. The richly original central insight is Greeson’s claim that writings about the South have profoundly shaped American literature and culture. Yet, as she details, generations of literary scholars have ignored the South in constructing a national imaginary, and she’s critical of those northern writers who use the South as site of their imperialist visions. With clear critical readings of dozens of specific works, Greeson crucially shows how important region is to an understanding of American culture and identity.