Book contents
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Fictions of the Native South
- Chapter 2 John Smith and the English Origins of Southern Exceptionalism
- Chapter 3 Plantation and Enlightenment
- Chapter 4 Geoconfederacy
- Chapter 5 In the Shadow of His Office
- Chapter 6 Shadows of Haiti
- Chapter 7 “Midnight Bakings” Amid Starvation
- Chapter 8 A Calculated Fiction
- Chapter 9 Maroons and Marronage in Antebellum African American Literature
- Chapter 10 Everyday Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century
- Chapter 11 Fables of the Bloody Shirt
- Chapter 12 A Heritage Unique in the Ages
- Chapter 13 Moonlight and Magnolias No More
- Chapter 14 Women Writers and the Southern Renaissance; or, the Work of Gender in Literary Periodization
- Chapter 15 Southern Geographies and New Negro Modernism
- Chapter 16 “A fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA”
- Chapter 17 Provincialism as a Positive Good
- Chapter 18 Faulkner’s Untimely Fiction
- Chapter 19 Reconsidering Du Bois’s “Central Text”
- Chapter 20 Cultural Activism and Theater of the Civil Rights Movement
- Chapter 21 Till the Hurt Becomes Music
- Chapter 22 Undead Sound
- Chapter 23 There Is No South
- Chapter 24 Hurricane Alley
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - John Smith and the English Origins of Southern Exceptionalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2021
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Fictions of the Native South
- Chapter 2 John Smith and the English Origins of Southern Exceptionalism
- Chapter 3 Plantation and Enlightenment
- Chapter 4 Geoconfederacy
- Chapter 5 In the Shadow of His Office
- Chapter 6 Shadows of Haiti
- Chapter 7 “Midnight Bakings” Amid Starvation
- Chapter 8 A Calculated Fiction
- Chapter 9 Maroons and Marronage in Antebellum African American Literature
- Chapter 10 Everyday Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century
- Chapter 11 Fables of the Bloody Shirt
- Chapter 12 A Heritage Unique in the Ages
- Chapter 13 Moonlight and Magnolias No More
- Chapter 14 Women Writers and the Southern Renaissance; or, the Work of Gender in Literary Periodization
- Chapter 15 Southern Geographies and New Negro Modernism
- Chapter 16 “A fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA”
- Chapter 17 Provincialism as a Positive Good
- Chapter 18 Faulkner’s Untimely Fiction
- Chapter 19 Reconsidering Du Bois’s “Central Text”
- Chapter 20 Cultural Activism and Theater of the Civil Rights Movement
- Chapter 21 Till the Hurt Becomes Music
- Chapter 22 Undead Sound
- Chapter 23 There Is No South
- Chapter 24 Hurricane Alley
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter seeks to better understand the formation of literary-geographical identities and imaginaries by examining the publications and cultural afterlife of Captain John Smith, the explorer, promoter, author, soldier, and self-made knight so closely associated with the beginning of English involvement in North America, and particularly with the original colony of Virginia. The chapter provides a brief overview of the longstanding tendency to see Smith and his works as belonging to, and even a point of origin for, the literature and character of America and the U.S. South, and how this has made him a political and historical lightning rod in highly contentious constructions of North/South identity. To account for this contentious afterlife, but to also move beyond it, the chapter surveys critical approaches that have since better situated Smith’s place in the literature and culture of Renaissance England. Looking at examples from his major works, the chapter attempts to show some of Smith’s experimental structuring and shaping of oppositional and antithetical literary-geographical imaginaries, which he employed to address economic and geographical challenges for the English nation state in the modern colonial and plantation context.
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- A History of the Literature of the U.S. South , pp. 34 - 53Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021