Southern Antebelum

Political and economic leadership in the South by the end of the 18th century had moved from Virginia to South Carolina, curiously Charleston, when it became clear that raw cotton was to be that states and the personas essential product and that slavery was therefore necessary to the future. For the head start 50 years the southern well-nigh outpost of the British empire in America, Charleston became a major commercial heart and supported the development of a wealthy merchant and planter class, which in turn encouraged a lively cultural life including one of two newspapers published in the South, a library society, and bookstores. It was at one of these, Russells Bookstore, that the members of the Charleston School gathered under the leadership of statesman and critic Hugh Swinton Legaré, editor and contributor to the Southern Review (1828-32). The group included among its membership quixotic poet Paul Hamilton Hayne , editor of Russells magazine (1857-60), and other lyrical mawkish poets of the pro-Confederacy school such as Henry Timrod, Laureate of the Confederacy.

The most influential member of the group, and probably in his time the best-known southern writer, was William Gilmore Simms, editor during his career of 10 periodicals and author of over 80 volumes of history, poetry, criticism, biography, drama, essays, stories, and novels, including a series of nationally popular shore romances around life on the frontier and diachronic romances about the American Revolution. He was one of the first to make a profession of writing. Simmss only serious rival as a writer in the South was Baltimore politician John Pendleton Kennedy, whose snug fictional sketches in Swallow Barn (1832) helped establish the plantation novel, which in its depiction of a mythic genteel past tense and an ideal social structure has found hundreds of imitators in American romance fiction. Less-accomplished but talented fiction writers of the time, all of whom wrote historical romances... If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com

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