SOURCE: Ridgely, J. V. “The Southern Romance: The Matter of Virginia” and “The Southern Way of Life: The 1830s and '40s.” In Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature, pp. 32-49, 50-61. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1980.

In the following excerpt, Ridgely observes myth-making qualities in the novels of the Old South—romantic works that elaborate themes of Southern uniqueness, manifest destiny, and separatism.

The Southern Romance: the Matter of Virginia

Readers of magazines like the Messenger were often treated to nostalgic glimpses of olden times; the sight of the ruined church tower at Jamestown was good for any number of columns of sentimental posturing, and the fate of the red man, now that he was no longer any real peril, was a natural theme for weepy elegiac verse. But the full-scale revivification of southern history was the province of the writers of long romances, and they quickly developed a...