SOURCE: Manning, Susan. “Industry and Idleness in Colonial Virginia: A New Approach to William Byrd II.” Journal of American Studies 28, no. 2 (August 1994): 169-90.

In the following essay, Manning argues that the “southernness” of Byrd's prose in his History of the Dividing Line is deliberate and self-conscious.

The inception of American regionalism is routinely identified by scholars in either Robert Beverley or William Byrd II, both native Virginians who wrote intensely local works (The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705; The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728) which are amongst the enduring literary products of colonial America. The regional base of both works is immediately apparent in their subjects and setting; but to stop here is to leave critical questions unanswered, questions which have in recent years begun to be addressed by ethnographers and historians such as David...