Messing With Romance: American Poetics and Antebellum Southern Fiction

Messing with Romance is a reinvestigation of southern literary history and a case study in the potentials of genre criticism. Offering contextualized readings of novels produced by representatives of the southern elite between 1824 and 1854, the study traces a development that is as fascinating as it is contradictory: from pretences of &«realism» to bold fantasies of fiction's socially transformative power, and eventually toward the collapse of the discourse of &«romance» to which southern novelists had contributed with such desperate determination. Along the way, prominent critical clichés come under scrutiny: firstly, that antebellum southern literature followed a clear-cut course of radicalization; secondly, that literary conventions can easily be identified as the determining formats of ideological discourses.