1. The Antebellum South -- 2. The Production of Southern Literature -- 3. The Form of Southern Literature -- 4. The Genesis of the "Plantation Novel" -- 5. Representing Southern Women's Lives -- 6. Unmarried Women: The "Belle," Passive Sufferer versus Spirited Woman -- 7. Unmarried Women: The "Spinster" and the "Fallen Woman" -- 8. Married Woman: Mothers -- 9. Widows -- 10. Slavery: The "Patriarchal" Institution -- 11. The Master-Slave Relationship: Individual Portraits of Slaves -- 12. The Problem of Class in Southern Society and Southern Literature -- 13. Representations of Poor Whites -- 14. The Problem of the Yeoman Farmer.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-296) and index.

This book explores the way in which literature can be used to reinforce social power. Through rigorous readings of a series of antebellum plantation novels, Susan J. Tracy shows how the narrative strategies employed by proslavery Southern writers served to justify and perpetuate the oppression of women, blacks, and poor whites. Tracy focuses on the historical romances of six authors: George Tucker, James Ewell Heath, William Alexander Caruthers, John Pendleton Kennedy, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and William Gilmore Simms. Using variations on a recurring plot - in which a young planter/hero rescues a planter's daughter from an "enemy" of her class - each of these novelists reinforced an idealized vision of a Southern civilization based on male superiority, white supremacy, and class inequality.