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Cavaliers and Economists - Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820-1860 (Hardcover)
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Cavaliers and Economists - Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820-1860 (Hardcover)
Series: Southern Literary Studies
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Offering a compelling intervention in studies of antebellum
writing, Katharine A. Burnett's Cavaliers and Economists: Global
Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820-1860
examines how popular modes of literary production in the South
emerged in tandem with the region's economic modernization. In a
series of deeply historicized readings, Burnett positions southern
literary form and genre as existing in dialogue with the plantation
economy's evolving position in the transatlantic market before the
Civil War. The antebellum southern economy comprised part of a
global network of international commerce driven by a version of
laissez-faire liberal capitalism that championed unrestricted trade
and individual freedom to pursue profit. Yet the economy of the
U.S. South consisted of large-scale plantations that used slave
labor to cultivate staple crops, including cotton. Each individual
plantation functioned as a racially and socially repressive
community, a space that seemingly stood apart from the
international economic networks that fueled southern capitalism.
For writers from the South, fiction became a way to imagine the
region as socially and culturally progressive, while still
retaining hallmarks of ""traditional"" southern culture, namely
plantation slavery, in the context of a rapidly changing global
economy. Burnett excavates an elaborate network of transatlantic
literary exchange, operating concurrently with the region's
economic expansion, in which southern writers adopted popular
British genres, such as the historical romance and the seduction
novel, as models for their own representations of the U.S. South.
Each chapter focuses on a different genre, pairing largely
under-studied southern texts with well-known British works. Ranging
from the humorous sketch to the imperial adventure tale and the
social problem novel, Cavaliers and Economists reveals how southern
writers like Augusta Jane Evans, Johnson Jones Hooper, Maria
McIntosh, William Gilmore Simms, and George Tucker reworked
familiar literary forms to reinvent the South through fiction. By
considering the intersection of economic history and literary
genre, Cavaliers and Economists provides an expansive study of the
means by which authors created southern literature in relation to
global free market capitalism, showing that, in the process, they
renegotiated and rejustified the institution of slavery.
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