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The Lineaments of Antebellum Southern Romanticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Michael O'Brien
Michael O'Brien
Affiliation:
Michael O'Brien is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. An earlier version of this paper was read to the Southern Historical Association in 1984, where it benefited from the criticisms of T. J. Jackson Lears, John McCardell, and Drew Gilpin Faust.
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Extract

It is a curiosity of modern scholarship that the only general work on antebellum Southern Romanticism is Rollin G. Osterweis' Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, which has been in print since 1949, is still read, and still –if only for want of a competitor –used. Yet much has changed in understanding of the social and intellectual history of the Old South, and even more of the phenomenon of Romanticism. These changes, natural enough over the span of two intellectual generations, have made many of that book's presumptions questionable; so a second look at the problem seems worthwhile, to clear the ground and to indicate fresh directions. For Osterweis wrote within the assumptions of the 1940s about the nature and shortcomings of Romanticism. He was guided by Irving Babbitt, who scorned Romanticism as a puling and exaggerated passion instigated by Rousseau, a disaster for rational men: at best silly, as with the jousts of antebellum Virginia; at worst dangerous, as with the secession convention of South Carolina. But Osterweis was Babbitt with a difference. While Babbitt and, more weightily, Ernst Cassirer had thought that Romanticism had led the world astray and it was still astray, with Hitler the avatar of Hegel as chilling evidence, Osterweis cheerily regarded Romanticism as a movement that had expired with the nineteenth century, a fossil safe to mock. To this perspective, largely adopted from Jacques Barzun's Romanticism and the Modern Ego (1943), Osterweis added the view of Arthur Lovejoy, who had insisted that Romanticism, while possessing a core notion of diversity and flux, should most safely be regarded as multiple: there were Romanticisms, not a Romanticism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , August 1986 , pp. 165 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

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37 Here I differ from Faust, A Sacred Circle, 19, which remarks, “These Southerners were cultural provincials who lacked the sophistication of modern or even of the most prominent nineteenth-century Critics.” I do not see Southerners as any more provincial than Englishmen, nor any marked superiority in modern thought. Hence I doubt that intellectual Southerners gathered allusions “to enhance the significance of their own Situation, imparting to it a degree of transcendence,” or at least any more so than any group of intellectuals. I find puzzling the implication that for a Southerner to quote Vico was pretentious, for an Englishman, not so.

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39 “It is noticeable that the word curiosity, which in other languages is used in a good sense … has in our language no sense of the kind, no sense but a rather bad and disparaging one”: Arnold, Matthew, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” [1864], in Essays Literary and Critical (London, 1906), 10Google Scholar.

40 There has been some interesting comparative work lately on Southern slavery and Russian serfdom, with some note of the proslavery and proserfdom arguments. Anyone who knows the Southern antebellum intellectual scene and reads Berlin, Isaiah, “A Remarkable Decade,” in Russian Thinkers (London, 1978), 114–209Google Scholar, will suspect that the project of a more systematic comparison between the life of the mind in the Old South and Russia would be worthwhile. See Kolchin, Peter, “In Defense of Servitude: American Proslavery and Russian Proserfdom Arguments, 1760–1860,” American Historical Review, 85 (1980), 809–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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43 Not, it is worth observing, a clubbable man.

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58 Dew, Thomas R., “On the Influence of the Federative Republican System of Government upon Literature and the Development of Character,” Southern Literary Messenger, 2 (1836), 261–82Google Scholar, which draws largely on Madame de Staël's The Influence of Literature Upon Society. There is a good book to be written on Southerners in Italy in the nineteenth century, as a companion piece to Brand, C. P., Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1957)Google Scholar.

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