SOURCE: Rubin, Louis D. “Politics and the Novel: George W. Cable and the Genteel Tradition.” In William Elliott Shoots a Bear: Essays on the Southern Literary Imagination, pp. 61-81. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975.

In the following essay, Rubin examines George Washington Cable's novel John March, Southerner as it illustrates the limitations of the genteel, local color tradition that dominated Southern fiction in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

My subject is the rather broad and, happily, permissive one of the various ways in which works of literature can be affected by, and also can affect, the politics of a time and a place. Of course it is foolish to maintain (as I have, however, heard it sometimes maintained) that there is no political dimension to some works of literature—that, let us say, Alice in Wonderland or “Dover Beach” is nonpolitical. For if politics, as...