Working at Romance [Elektronische Ressource] : poetics and ideology in novels of the antebellum American South 1824 - 1854 / vorgelegt von Zeno Ackermann

Siegfried Grillmeyer

Informations

• Publié par: universitat_regensburg
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 6
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Working at “Romance”
Poetics and Ideology in Novels of the
Antebellum American South
1824-1854
Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde
der Philosophischen Fakultät IV (Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften)
der Universität Regensburg
vorgelegt von
Zeno Ackermann
Regensburg, 2004Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. phil. Udo Hebel
Zweitgutachter: PD Dr. phil. habil. Paul NeubauerGreat genius and the people of these states must never be
demeaned to romances. As soon as histories are properly told
there is no more need of romances.
Walt Whitman, preface to 1st ed. of Leaves of Grass (1855)
[T]here come to us from the deserts of the past certain voices
which "syllable men's names"––names that seem to sound like
"Paulding," "Brown," "Kennedy"––and we catch nothing further.
These are ghosts, and they wrote about ghosts, and the ghosts
have vanished utterly. Another of these shadowy mediums . . . is
W. Gilmore Simms, of whom the best and the worst thing to be
said is this––that he is nearly as good as Cooper, and deserves
fame nearly as much.
John William DeForest, "The Great American Novel" (1868)
It was to this that the South owed her final defeat. It was for lack
of a literature that she was left behind in the great race for
outside support, and that in the supreme moment of her
existence she found herself arraigned at the bar of the world
without an advocate and without a defence. . . . [S]he was
conquered by the pen rather than by the sword.
Thomas Nelson Page, The Old South (1892)Acknowledgements
This study was accepted as a doctoral thesis by the University of Regensburg,
Germany, in April 2001. For publication in the present form, the original text has been
shortened, slightly modified and updated.
I could not have written this study without the support of a number of individuals
and institutions. I am particularly grateful to the late Prof. Hans Bungert, who
generously supported my research project. To Prof. Udo Hebel, who immediately
agreed to supervise my dissertation after the sudden death of Prof. Bungert, I am
deeply indebted for his open-mindedness and understanding. My gratitude also goes to
Dr. Paul Neubauer for being so accessible and helpful throughout the process of
writing this study. I would also like to thank the German-American Fulbright
Commission, whose grant enabled me to participate in the American Studies Summer
Institute at New York University and to do research in the United States. Moreover, I
need to mention the helpful assistance I received from the staff at the New York Public
Library, the Library of Congress, Washington, and the library of the University of
Regensburg.
At the Department for English and American Studies of the University of
Regensburg, Christa Schmuderer, Juliane Bierschenk and Dr. Karsten Fitz have been
both great colleagues and dear friends. For great discussions across the disciplines I
am deeply grateful to Robert Glotz, Dr. Juan Martin Koch, Dr. Ansgar Reiß and
Matthias Weiß, who all provided an incredible amount of spiritual as well as intellectual
sustenance. I am especially thankful to Tim Kurtzweil, Carlos Perez and Alexandra
Messer for the patience, knowledge and linguistic skill they put into the proofreading of
the manuscript in its various stages. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my
parents, Luise Ackermann and Dr. Walter Ackermann, for their enduring support and
for their ongoing interest in my work.
Regensburg, December 2003
Zeno Ackermann4
Contents
1. Introduction: "Romance" and/as Ideology 6
1.1 Genre as a Format of Ideology? – “Romance” and the “Old South” 8
1.2 “Romance” and the Pragmatic Power of Literature 12
1.3 The Theory of American Literary Exceptionalism 15
1.4 New Critical Approaches and Their Relevance for the
Study of Antebellum Southern Literature 20
2. “Romance” as Compromise: Walter Scott's Example 27
3. Materiality versus Textuality: George Tucker and the Catastrophic
Commencement of the Southern Novel 34
3.1 Tucker’s Critique of “Romance” Rhetorics 34
3.2 Realism in Defense of Slavery 41
3.3 The Doomed Legacy of True “Romance” 45
4. The "Romance of Domestic Life": Salvational Hybridizations in John P.
Kennedy’s Swallow Barn 50
4.1 The “Picturesque Tourist” as an Agent of Assimilation 50
4.2 Slaves and Swamps: The Pastoral Suspension of History 56
4.3 Generic Hybridity as Political Strategy 63
5. Tilting the Balance: The Historical Romances of John P. Kennedy and
William A. Caruthers 67
5.1 “Romance” as Absolute History: Kennedy’s Horse-Shoe Robinson 67
5.2 Medievalist Progressivism: Caruthers’ Paradoxical Romances of
Chivalry 77
5.3 A Fictional Road to Rebellion? 865
6. The Sacrifice of Dialectics: William G. Simms’s The Partisan 90
6.1 The Empowerment of Fiction: Simms’s Concept of “Romance” 90
6.2 The “Romance” of the Swamp and Its Ideological Implications 93
6.3 Rhetoric Digesting History: Porgy as Hero 99
7. From “Romance” to Real Politics: Nathaniel B. Tucker’s
The Partisan Leader 107
7.1 A Handbook for Rebellion 107
7.2 Coercion by Consent: Tucker’s Social Vision 111
7.3 The Collapse of “Romance” 117
8. The Breaking Point: “Romance” and the Market Revolution 121
8.1 Sectional Controversy, the Panic of 1837, and the Crisis of
Southern Literature 121
8.2 The “American Renaissance” and the Dissociation of American
Culture 131
8.3 From Simms to Hawthorne: The Privatization of "Romance" 142
9. From Ethos to Pathos: William G. Simms's Woodcraft 152
9.1 The “Romance” of Partisan Life and the Bathos of Civil Society 152
9.2 The Doomed Domestication of “Romance” 157
9.3 Simms's "Answer" to Uncle Tom's Cabin 166
9.4 The Erosion of “Romance”: Ideological Consequences 174
10. Deconstructing “Romance” / “Romancing” Contingency:
John Esten Cooke’s Virginia Comedians 178
10.1 The Virginia Comedians and the Self-Parodic Poetics of the
"American Renaissance” 178
10.2 World as Theater / History as Comedy: The Literary
Construction of Social Realities 185
11. Conclusion: The Breakdown of Narrativity 193
List of Works Cited 211When we mess with romance, we take awful
chances, which, of course, is exactly why we
should mess with it.
––Jack Cady, The American Writer (1999)
1. Introduction: "Romance" and/as Ideology
The present study explores and problematizes the relationship between ideology and
aesthetics in novels produced in the American South from 1824 to 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 both levels, I examine
prominent critical notions: firstly, that antebellum southern literature followed a clear-cut
and largely predetermined course of ideological radicalization; secondly, that literary
forms and conventions can be identified as natural manifestations of specific
ideologemes or even as determining formats of particular ideological discourses.
Focusing on a complex of poetological and ideological notions which was––and
often still is––associated with the term "romance," I set out to historicize the
relationship between ideology and form. The investigation aims to show how concepts
of genre are utilized for the statement of ideologies, i.e. how ideological messages are
purposefully inscribed into poetological concepts. My question, then, is not what it
means if a narrative is a "romance" but rather why certain narratives, produced under
the strain of certain socio-historical conditions, ask to be read as "romances." Most of
the investigated fictions by George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, William
Alexander Caruthers, William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker and John
Esten Cooke do so quite explicitly and self-consciously. Centering on the vague but
crucial term "romance," these texts conduct a discourse on literary conventionality, its
relation to social reality or the course of history, and its pragmatic potential of altering
both.
An analysis of this discourse, its intra- and intertextual development as well as
its connections to overarching American discourses and socio-economic
transformations, sheds light not only on the problematic relationship between genre
and ideology but also on the complex workings of southern ideologies in the context of
intersectional crisis and capitalist modernization. In fact, the novels produced in the
antebellum South from 1824 to 1854 can be seen as notable examples of the
potentials, limitations and dangers inherent in conservative ideologies. These
specimens of a doomed conservatism continue to be fascinating as testimonies of a
surprising and highly significant attempt: the attempt to stay the historical dynamics of
disintegration and alienation by means of an aesthetic intervention that was to be7
based on the conserving power of (literary) style.
Moreover, the specific conception of the power of literature which was at the
heart of nineteenth-century usages of the term "romance" has proved surprisingly
persistent. Ever since Mark Twain pointed to the historical fiction of Walter Scott as a
major reason for the Civil War,