Working at �Romance�: Poetics and ideology in novels of the Antebellum American South, 1824 - 1854

摘要

The study �Working at Romance� explores and problematizes the relation of ideology and aesthetics in novels produced in the American South between 1824 and 1854. It is both a reinvestigation of southern literary history and a case study in the potentials of genre criticism for the analysis of ideological developments. On the one hand, the persistent notion that antebellum southern literature followed a clear-cut and largely predetermined course of ideological radicalization is interrogated. On the other hand, drawing on Fredric Jameson�s interpretation of Northrop Frye´s tools of analysis, the study asks to what extent literary forms and conventions can be identified as (natural) manifestations of specific ideologemes or even as determining formats of particular ideological discourses. Discussing antebellum southern novels by George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, William A. Caruthers, William Gilmore Simms and John Esten Cooke as specific contributions to an overarching American discourse on "romance," the study aims to recover these texts from the isolated position they hold in current criticism. Questioning easy stereotypes about the ideological purpose and content of southern fiction, the study focuses on the peculiar conservative ideology of literariness which southern writers, participating in an established American tradition, propagated under the codeword "romance." It can be seen that southern writers used (grossly distorted) images of slavery not only in order to deliver a critique of capitalist transformation which is at times not altogether ineffective but also as an (illusory) peg on which to hang their more and more desperate attempts at a restitution of "romance" to "modern life." Moreover, it is demonstrated that the rising ideological and political tension that announced the coming of the Civil War motivated not only shrill propaganda novels but also surprisingly complex, if tortured, fictions that mirror many of the concerns and strategies traditionally ascribed to the "American Renaissance."