A01=Katharine A. Burnett
abolition
adventure novel
antebellum America
Augusta Jane Evans
Author_Katharine A. Burnett
black labor
British aristocracy
capitalism
capitalist world economy
Category=DS
Category=NHK
Category=WQH
Charles Dickens
Civil War
confidence man
cotton trade
Cuba
defense of slavery
economic expansion
England
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
feudal honor
filibustering
Frederick Douglass
free market
frontiersmen
gentry
George Tucker
George Washington Cable
Harriet Jacobs
Henry Bibb
historical romance
Horse-Shoe Robinson
imperial expansion
imperial romance
industrial reform novel
industrialization
industry
James W. C. Pennington
John March
John Pendleton Kennedy
Johnson Jones Hooper
Joseph Holt Ingraham
laissez-faire capitalism
literary form
Lucy Holcombe Pickens
Maria McIntosh
modernization
nineteenth-century literary genres
origins of southern literature
plantation system
proslavery text
revolutionary war romance
seduction novel
self-made man
Simon Suggs
sketch book
Sketches by Boz
skilled labor
slave labor
slave narrative
slavery
southern cavalier
southern honor
southern planter
Southerner
southwestern humor
The Fugitive Blacksmith
The Sword and the Distaff
transatlantic literary relations
travel sketch
US South
wage slavery
Walter Scott
William Gilmore Simms
William Wells Brown
Woodcraft
Product details
- ISBN 9780807169308
- Weight: 333g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 May 2019
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
Katharine A. Burnett is assistant professor of English at Fisk University, where she also coordinates the gender studies program.
