SOURCE: Wimsatt, Mary Ann. “Antebellum Fiction.” In The History of Southern Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 92-107. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Wimsatt surveys the mostly romantic prose fiction of the pre-Civil War American South.

Antebellum Americans, especially in the South, relished the popular romance as it had developed from the mid-eighteenth century onward, given great impetus by the historical novels of Walter Scott; and it is to the romance tradition and its several offshoots, Gothic, sentimental, and domestic, that we may trace the main features of the fiction produced between 1830 and 1870. That fiction employs, with ingenuity and gusto, the motifs of romance in all ages—the mysterious births, concealed parentage, separated lovers, kidnappings, robberies, and shipwrecks, as well as the general emphasis on tribulations-preceding-rewards that are the stock-in-trade of the genre and of the Western myths from which it...