BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Bain, Robert, and Joseph M. Flora, eds. Fifty Southern Writers Before 1900: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987, 601 p.

Short, bibliographic essays on the major writers of the South who published before 1900.

Green, Fletcher M., and J. Isaac Copeland, eds. The Old South. Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1980, 173 p.

Generalized, mostly non-literary bibliography of the Old South organized by topic.

Holman, C. Hugh. “The Literature of the Old South.” In Fifteen American Authors Before 1900: Bibliographic Essays on Research and Criticism, edited by Robert A. Rees and Earl N. Harbert, pp. 387-400. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971.

Bibliographic summary of major secondary sources on antebellum literature organized by genre.

BIOGRAPHIES

Anderson, John Q., ed. With the Bark On: Popular Humor of the Old South. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967, 337 p.

Collection of humorous tales and sketches that originally appeared in Southern periodicals and newspapers between 1835 and 1860.

Ayers, Edward L., and Bradley C. Mittendorf, eds. The Oxford Book of the American South: Testimony, Memory, and Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 597 p.

Contains excerpts from a broad historical and cultural range of Southern literature.

Forkner, Ben, and Patrick Samway, eds. A New Reader of the Old South: Major Stories, Tales, Slave Narratives, Diaries, Essays, Travelogues, Poetry and Songs, 1820-1920. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., 1991, 644 p.

Extensive compilation of nineteenth-century Southern literature preceded by a summary introduction.

CRITICISM

Bentley, Nancy. “White Slaves: The Mulatto Hero in Antebellum Fiction.” American Literature 65, no. 3 (September 1993): 501-22.

Probes the thematic tension between domestic ideology and heroic, revolutionary violence as it intersects in the male bi-racial figures in works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, and others.

Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. “Play, Work, and Ethics in the Old South.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 41 (1977): 33-51.

Examines the considerable cultural significance of play and leisure in antebellum society.

Dayan, Joan. “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves.” American Literature 66, no. 2 (June 1994): 239-73.

Contends that in Edgar Allan Poe's love poetry and tales about women, the precursors of romance and the institution of slavery are interwined.

Eaton, Clement. The Mind of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967, 348 p.

Surveys the sensibilities of the Old South as reflected in its literature, from yeoman humor to southern romanticism.

Ellis, Michael. “Literary Dialect as Linguistic Evidence: Subject-Verb Concord in Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature.” American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage 69, no. 2 (summer 1994): 128-44.

Analyzes nonstandard subject-verb agreement in the dialect works of such antebellum fiction writers as William Gilmore Simms, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, William A. Caruthers, and William Tappan Thompson.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988, 544 p.

Endeavors to reconstruct and interpret the social world of the antebellum plantation.

Grammer, John M. Pastoral and Politics in the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996, 185 p.

Assesses the impact of five Southern thinkers—John Taylor, John Randolph, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, George Fitzhugh, and Joseph Glover Baldwin—in inventing and evaluating the concept of the Old South.

Gray, Richard. “‘I am a Virginian’: Edgar Allan Poe and the South.” In Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism, pp. 1-35. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Investigates Edgar Allan Poe's efforts to construct a Southern identity for himself and appraises the Southern dimension of his works.

Lemay, J. A. Leo. “The Origins of the Humor of the Old South.” The Southern Literary Journal 23, no. 2 (spring 1991): 3-13.

Traces the literary precursors of antebellum literary humor.

Macdonald, Christine. “Judging Jurisdictions: Geography and Race in Slave Law and Literature of the 1830s.” American Literature 71, no. 4 (December 1999): 625-55.

Considers the topic of regional and racial interpretations of law, using the texts Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), Richard Hildreth's The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836), and Caroline Gilman's novel Recollections of a Southern Matron (1838) as evidence.

MacKethan, Lucinda H. “Second Only to the First: Two Sides of Honor in the Old South.” Southern Literary Journal 15, no. 3 (1983): 113-22.

Reviews Bertram Wyatt-Brown's 1982 study of antebellum social and behavioral systems in Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South.

Moss, Elizabeth. Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992, 249 p.

Documents the efforts of women writers in the Old South to endorse their culture and to justify the practice of slavery via the medium of the popular feminine novel.

O'Brien, Michael. Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988, 271 p.

Features numerous essays on the thought of the Old South, particularly focusing on the subject of Southern Romanticism.

———. “‘The Water Rose in the Graves’: Discontinuity and Localism in Nineteenth-Century Southern Thought.” In The United States South: Regionalism and Identity, edited by Valeria Gennaro Lerda and Tjebbe Westendorp, pp. 55-74. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1990.

Highlights the strong current of regionalism in Southern literature and thought before the Civil War.

O'Brien, Michael, and David Moltke-Hansen, eds. Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986, 468 p.

Provides a collection of essays on the intellectual history and cultural influence of Charleston, South Carolina, in the Old South.

Ownby, Ted, ed. Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993, 241 p.

Presents cultural and historical essays regarding the effects of slavery on the racially-charged social relationships of the Old South.

Parks, Edd Winfield. Ante-Bellum Southern Literary Critics. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1962, 358 p.

Chronicles the literary history of the South between 1785 and 1861, featuring essays on such writers as Richard Henry Wilde, William Gilmore Simms, Philip Pendleton Cooke, Thomas Holly Chivers, and others.

Phillips, Elizabeth C. “‘His Right of Attendance’: The Image of the Black Man in the Works of Poe and Two of His Contemporaries.” In No Fairer Land: Studies in Southern Literature Before 1900, edited by J. Lasley Dameron and James W. Mathews, pp. 172-84. Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing Company, 1986.

Argues that Edgar Allan Poe, along with contemporary Southern writers William Gilmore Simms and John Tomlin, made little attempt to surmount racial stereotypes in their portrayal of black characters.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989, 234 p.

Explicates the principal social and literature themes of the Old South with special attention to the writings of William Gilmore Simms, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry Timrod.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr., and C. Hugh Holman, eds. Southern Literary Study: Problems and Possibilities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975, 235 p.

Includes an introductory essay on the relationship between Southern literature and society by Rubin as well as the text of a panel discussion on nineteenth-century Southern literature moderated by Holman.

Simpson, Lewis P. The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975, 109 p.

Offers insights into the intermingling of pastoral and historical sensibilities in the literature of the Old South.

White, Dana F., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. Olmsted South: Old South Critic/New South Planner. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979, 259 p.

Presents historical essays on Frederick Law Olmsted, a Northerner who traveled extensively through the Old South recording his impressions of the institution of slavery.

Woods, James M. “In the Eye of the Beholder: Slavery in the Travel Accounts of the Old South, 1790-1860.” Southern Studies 1, no. 1 (spring 1990): 33-59.

Compares eyewitness reports of slavery and slave life by travelers—apologists and abolitionists alike—to the Old South.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. “God and Honor in the Old South.” The Southern Review 25, no. 2 (April 1989): 283-96.

Details the long-standing cultural tension between honor and religion in the antebellum South.