| This dissertation explores the modes and functions of the historical work produced by several southern novelists and poets from the middle of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth: William Gilmore Simms, Thomas Nelson Page, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Shelby Foote. The creation of the South, as Richard Gray and others have asserted, was a rhetorical act, involving many forms of discourse, and I extend this line of thought to claim that historiography is a distinct discursive mode by which southern writers have entered directly and self-consciously into the construction and reconfiguration of southern identity. In a distinct public role as keepers of memory, the conservative writers put aside their artistic prerogative of subjective vision and alienation to gain the broader cultural authority of men of letters. By shaping the historical image they could create the truth of the South and shape an alternative order to modernity and the main line of American development; but, as Lewis P. Simpson has shown, the Old South as a “spiritual nation” and a redemptive history was haunted by the suppressed irony that it was, as a unique modern slave society, itself part of the “apocalypse of modern civilization.” Tate and Warren, in the wake of modernism, were forced to abandon the Old South as a viable alternative and formulate new, albeit very different, visions of history. Warren in particular would succeed in reenvisioning a role for the southern man of letters beyond polemical imperatives, but only in Foote's three-volume narrative of the Civil War do we find a full synthesis of public history and the private vision of the artist.;My work extends some familiar lines of inquiry about the role of history, but also opens new ones by creating a comparative frame for a neglected group of texts. We can better understand the burden of history for the southern artist by examining those works in which the writer assumes the guise of the historian. Further, though my focus is on a traditional group of authors, this study lays the groundwork for further research into the historical work of African-American and women authors, such as William Wells Brown, Charles Chesnutt, and Grace King. |
