SOURCE: Kreyling, Michael. “The Hero in Antebellum Southern Narrative.” The Southern Literary Journal 16, no. 2 (spring 1984): 3-20.

In the following essay, Kreyling highlights the typical adherence of the antebellum novel to the conventions of heroic romance.

We lack a tradition in the arts; more to the point, we lack a literary tradition. We lack even a literature. We have just enough literary remains from the old regime to prove to us that, had a great literature risen, it would have been unique in modern times.

—Allen Tate, “The Profession of Letters in the South”

Antebellum Southern writing—of all the “remains,” narrative prose is my subject—has been confined to the nether regions by two related critical verdicts. The matter, tales of cavalier heroes and of plantation life, was tailored to deflect both inner and outer objections to slavery: the complete body of work is therefore nothing more than...