In Yeoman Versus Cavalier: The Old Southwest's Fictional Road to Rebellion, Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., examines the emergence of the planter-aristocrat over the yeoman as the dominant cultural icon in the newly settled states of the Old Southwest -- Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas -- during the first half of the nineteenth century. He related this region's shift in cultural ideals, as reflected in its literature, both to the coming of the Civil War and the failure of the postbellum South to reintegrate itself fully into the nation.In the early 1800s Thomas Jefferson's stalwart yeoman farmer was the mythic figure that gave the most dynamic expression to and most compelling justification for expansion to the west. This potent symbol of rural democracy was enthusiastically embraced by settlers in both midwestern and southern territories. By 1830, however, residents of the new southern states had initiated a profound imaginative movement away from the frontier myths that had linked them with midwesterners. Faced with increasingly hostile attacks on slavery and the plantation system, southerners from Virginia to Louisiana united in defense of the plantation South. Watson shows how writers of the Old Southwest reflected this cultural shift in their tendency to idealize the planter and to subvert, subordinate, or ignore the yeoman. Joining cultural and intellectual forces with the more established plantation societies of the Eastern Seaboard, these writers turned toward the Cavalier -- the noble, cultured planter of aristocratic blood and manners who, like a father, presided with wisdom and love over a large plantation -- as the primary representative of the southern way of life.Watson builds his argument by analyzing many different kinds of writing. Choosing texts that shed light on the newly evolving culture of the Old Southwest, Watson discusses the novelists William Garrott Brown, James Lane Allen, Joseph Holt Ingraham, Caroline Lee Hentz, and Augusta Jane Evans, historian Charles Gayarre, humorists Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and Thomas Bangs Thorpe, New South propagandist Henry Grady, novelist and story writer George Washington Cable, and poets Joseph Brennan and Sidney Lanier.The Cavalier ideal, Watson explains, unified the states of the Confederacy and served as a kind if icon to be carried into battle. After the war the figure was resurrected by southern writers and made an integral part of the region's Lost Cause myth, which northerners helped perpetuate. The Cavalier figure has continued to lead a vigorous life into the present century, as attested by novels such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, Stark Young's So Red the Rose, and even William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!Yeoman Versus Cavalier is a solid and entertainingly written analysis of how the Cavalier, as the South's unifying mythical figure, helped shape southern history and the creation of the legend of the Old South following the Civil War. It contributes greatly to our understanding of the antebellum South and demonstrates how studying a work of literature can lead to a fuller comprehension of the culture that produced it.

In The Politics of Southern Pastoral Literature, 1785–1885: Jeffersonian Afterlives, Peter Templeton presents a wide-ranging and systematic evaluation of pastoral in the nineteenth-century Southern novel, offering an explicit appraisal of the philosophical and political rationale of pastoral literature alongside the existing body of research into the image of Jefferson following his death. Rather than assuming a homogeneous South, Templeton locates Southern pastoral in its specific political context, offering readings of significant factors such as the literary representation of landscape, of class and the yeoman ideal, and the institution of slavery and its intellectual underpinnings. Focusing on a six key Southern authors, both canonical and relatively understudied, the book charts key transformations in the politics of pastoral literature in the period, and noteworthy reconfigurations in the representation of Jefferson and his philosophies, in order to analyze what these signified to nineteenth-century Americans. In doing so, the text also demonstrates how ideologies react to the stresses imposed on them by political realities.

In this stimulating study, Mary Weaks-Baxter views the Southern Renaissance, 1900--1960, from a fresh perspective. Many writers in the South began consciously to create new myths for the region at the start of the twentieth century, and these myths, Weaks-Baxter argues, reframed southern history and culture. Instead of being rooted in the plantation culture that had provided inspiration for nineteenth-century southern writers, the new literature was inspired by "southern folk," the common people who farmed the earth and whose values derived from Jeffersonian agrarianism and democracy. By glorifying the yeoman farmer -- a figure not only central to southern life but revered throughout the country -- southern writers confirmed the essential Americanness of southern literature and the southernness of American history, creating a viable myth that offered the promise of renewal and purpose. To illustrate how the myth crossed racial, gender, and economic boundaries as well as geographic lines, Weaks-Baxter examines the work of diverse writers, including Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Olive Dargan, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Jesse Stuart, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Harriette Arnow, William Faulkner, and the Nashville Agrarians. Their portrayals of the lives of common men and women provided hope for all Americans as they were confronted with industrialization and the Great Depression. Weaks-Baxter shows how this agrarian fable led to a new Southern Renaissance in the late twentieth century, influencing the work of contemporary southern writers such as Madison Smartt Bell, Wendell Berry, Alice Walker, Dori Sanders, and Bobbie Ann Mason. With lively arguments and keen insights, Reclaiming the American Farmer will change the terms of discussion about the Southern Renaissance and southern literature in general as it demonstrates how mythologies can unify southerners as well as divide them.

An inviting look at the influence of the yeomans small farm on six modern southern writers

This is an absorbing work by Edgar Wallace, a British novelist, playwright, and journalist who was a famous writer of detective and suspense stories. Excerpt "IN conformity with the rule and practice of our family, I, Stephen Avon, Knight, and Alderman of the City of London (I make these descriptions from a desire to be identified rather than from any sense of vanity, for it ill becomes a man to boast of the favours which Almighty God has bestowed upon him) take up my task to describe those events which accompany, as it were, the lives of those dark members of my family, who are called the Black Avons."

"For more than a quarter-century, despite the admirable excavations that have unearthed such humorists as John Gorman Barr and Marcus Lafayette, the most significant of the humorists from the Old Southwest have remained the same: Crockett, Longstreet, Thompson, Baldwin, Thorpe, Hooper, Robb, Harris, and Lewis. Forming a kind of shadow canon in American literature that led to Mark Twain's early work, from 1834 to 1867 these authors produced a body of writing that continues to reward attentive readers." "James H. Justus's Fetching the Old Southwest examines this writing in the context of other discourses contemporaneous with it: travel books, local histories, memoirs, and sports manuals, as well as unpublished private forms such as personal correspondence, daybooks, and journals. Like most writing, humor is a product of its place and time, and the works studied herein are no exception. The antebellum humorists provide an important look into the social and economic conditions that were prevalent in the southern "new country," a place that would, in time, become the Deep South." "While previous books about Old Southwest humor have focused on individual authors, Justus has produced the first critical study to encompass all of the humor from this time period. Teachers and students of literary history will appreciate the incredible range of documentation, both primary and secondary."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.