SOURCE: Kreyling, Michael. “After the War: Romance and the Reconstruction of Southern Literature.” In Southern Literature in Transition: Heritage and Promise, edited by Philip Castille and William Osborne, pp. 111-25. Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1983.

In the following essay, Kreyling appraises the literary tastes of the New South in relation to three novelists: Lafcadio Hearn, Grace King, and George Washington Cable.

The southern writer in the closing decades of the nineteenth century faced pressures at once more powerful, enticing, and subtle than had ever faced him in, for example, the furious years of the sectionalist crisis of the 1850s. The southern author of that decade, William Gilmore Simms, reacted to the pressure with fiction that served his polemical purpose: the demolition of Yankee prejudice and the veneration of southern mores and institutions.

Three writers of the postbellum decades, Lafcadio Hearn, Grace King, and George Washington Cable, encountered less...