19th Century Southern Literature: Themes and Forms

Posted on Apr 3, 2025 in Philosophy and ethics

The Forms of 19th Century Southern Literature

The important literature of the 19th century South took four basic forms:

  1. Nature lyrics on the Southern landscape.
  2. Collections of framed sketches of backwoods character types.
  3. Episodic novels or linked sketches on the model of the epic historical romance.
  4. Romantic-satiric narrations of idyllic plantation life.

Supposed Southern Qualities

Among his supposed Southern qualities are:

  1. A high formalism of prose style.
  2. An idealization of women.
  3. A scorn of democracy and the idea of progress.
  4. An uneasiness about the age of the machine.

Apart from these characteristics, he is also concerned about death, fatal death, and the grotesque.

The Southern writer, like Poe, is supposedly preoccupied with death and fatality and adds to the modes of the Gothic and the grotesque.

Transcendentalism

The empirical appearance of things is not reliable since the material properties of natural objects are only the extended signs they use as a wrapping to conceal their spiritual essence. The world is not a collection of different phenomena, as positivism maintains, but is a symbol of a spiritual or divine message.

We have to find the good in evil things:

  • Matter is corruptible, a time-bound phenomenon, therefore perishable.
  • It cannot be defined as the essence of the universe.
  • Matter is only an accidental vesture or garment of the world, whereas the spirit underlying the sensual form of things is immutable, unchangeable.
  • Man’s real mission on earth is to go beyond matter and discover the spiritual meaning hidden behind it. All we can see in the world is simply a shadow of something everlasting: a tree, an animal, or a rock is neither a tree, nor an animal, nor a rock. They are simple symbols of something spiritual. What man has to do is simply to decode their meanings to find out what they are.

Positivism

Only accepts as true that which can be apprehended by the senses (only rely on empirical sources of knowledge). This means that:

  1. We can only admit as truthful and scientific that which we have perceived through the senses.
  2. Religion, theology, and metaphysics in any of its possible forms, i.e., every form of knowledge based upon non-empirical assumptions, is simply false and must be rejected.
  3. The world is a simple collection of phenomena.
  • Defines matter as the only true essence of objects. This entails that Time and Space are two fundamental categories.
  • The only valid method of knowledge must necessarily start from the empirical information we can get from the material appearance of things and must result in the formulation of hypotheses that will be tested and demonstrated with the aid of objective criteria.
  • Defines matter as the only true essence of objects. This entails that time and space are two fundamental categories.

Initiation Story

  • Overall plot: concerned with placing a central character through a particular sort of experience (generally painful), instigating them into something for which his/her earlier experience had not prepared him/her.
  • He/she goes from innocence to experience. The change is going to be abrupt, it’s going to happen very quickly.
  • Initiation is actually an anthropological term which means the passage from childhood or adolescence to adulthood and full attachment in adult society, which typically involves some sort of symbolic rite.

Classification of Initiation in Fictional Texts

According to their power and effect:

Tentative, uncompleted, decisive initiation.

  1. Some initiations lead to the threshold of maturity and understanding but do not definitely cross it. Such stories emphasize the shocking effect on their protagonists who had to be distinctly young.
  2. Some initiations take their protagonists across a threshold of maturity and understanding but leave them enmeshed in a struggle for certainty. These initiations sometimes include self-discovery.
  3. The most decisive initiations carry their protagonists firmly into maturity and understanding or at least show them embarked toward maturity.