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  1. In the master's eye
    representations of women, Blacks, and poor whites in antebellum Southern literature
    Published: 1995
    Publisher:  Univ. of Massachusetts Press, Amherst

    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... more

    Freie Universität Berlin, Universitätsbibliothek
    Unlimited inter-library loan, copies and loan
    Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Universitätsbibliothek, Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum
    Unlimited inter-library loan, copies and loan
    Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Haus Unter den Linden
    Unlimited inter-library loan, copies and loan
    Universität Potsdam, Universitätsbibliothek
    Unlimited inter-library loan, copies and loan

     

    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

     

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