SOURCE: MacKethan, Lucinda Hardwick. “The South as Arcady: Beginnings of a Mode.” In The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature, pp. 1-17. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

In the following introduction to her book-length study, MacKethan details the post-Reconstruction literary vision of the Old South as a pastoral paradise.

In 1863 a fifteen-year-old printer's apprentice, living on a quiet plantation in Georgia, published a brief essay on the charms of rural life in his employer's journal, The Countryman. The boy was Joel Chandler Harris; the theme of his rather light descriptive piece was one to which he would return in later years with a much more intense recognition of what was at stake. “People who live in crowded cities,” wrote the boy, “as a general thing, have no idea of the beautiful stillness of a Sabbath evening in the country, far away from the bustle...