In the master's eye : representations of women, Blacks, and poor whites in antebellum Southern literature

Resource Information

The work In the master's eye : representations of women, Blacks, and poor whites in antebellum Southern literature represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in DC Public Library System. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

In the master's eye : representations of women, Blacks, and poor whites in antebellum Southern literature

Title remainder

representations of women, Blacks, and poor whites in antebellum Southern literature

Statement of responsibility

Susan J. Tracy

Creator

• Tracy, Susan Jean, 1947-

Subject

• American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• American literature -- Male authors | History and criticism
• American literature -- Southern States -- History and criticism
• Literature and society -- Southern States -- History -- 19th century
• Patriarchy in literature
• African Americans in literature
• Social classes in literature
• Southern States -- In literature
• Southern States -- Intellectual life
• Women and literature -- Southern States -- History -- 19th century
• Working class white people in literature
• Poor white people in literature

Language

eng

Summary

• This book explores the way in which literature can be used to reinforce social power. Through rigorous readings of a series of antebellum plantation novels, Susan J. Tracy shows how the narrative strategies employed by proslavery Southern writers served to justify and perpetuate the oppression of women, blacks, and poor whites
• Tracy focuses on the historical romances of six authors: George Tucker, James Ewell Heath, William Alexander Caruthers, John Pendleton Kennedy, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and William Gilmore Simms. Using variations on a recurring plot - in which a young planter/hero rescues a planter's daughter from an "enemy" of her class - each of these novelists reinforced an idealized vision of a Southern civilization based on male superiority, white supremacy, and class inequality. It is a world in which white men are represented as the natural leaders of loyal and dependent women, grateful and docile slaves, and inferior poor whites. According to Tracy, the interweaving of these themes reveals the extent to which the Southern defense of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War was an argument not only about race relations but about gender and class relations as well

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

810.9/975

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Index

index present

LC call number

PS261

LC item number

.T73 1995

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography