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"Katharine A. Burnett's book is a tour-de-force that finally--at last--brings four major fields of study into the same room: nineteenth-century American literary studies, U.S. southern literary and cultural studies, histories of U.S. slavery, and histories of capitalism. Focusing on the economic discourses embedded in all kinds of antebellum southern literary texts, Burnett brilliantly shows how self-styled southern writers built an idea of the region that placed the South at the center of a national and global economic system. Burnett helps us understand the literature and culture of the 'Old South' like no scholar has done before. And, strange as it may seem to say, she also proves that we'll never fully understand modern capitalism until we understand southern literature in all its worldly forms." -- Michael P. Bibler, associate professor of southern studies, Louisiana State University
"Provocative and engaging,
Cavaliers and Economists posits a new origin story of southern literature, one that does not pit the leisured planter against the acquisitive Yankee, but instead links slavery to the development of a capitalist world order that transcended regional and national boundaries and that was predicated on exploitation and racial violence. The project of antebellum southern writers, Burnett argues, was not to distance the plantation South from the capitalist North, but rather to inscribe the region and its 'peculiar institution' as a constitutive element of a modernizing United States."--Sarah E. Gardner,
Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920-1941
About the author
Katharine A. Burnett is assistant professor of English at Fisk University, where she also coordinates the gender studies program.
Summary
Offering a compelling intervention in studies of antebellum writing, Katharine Burnett's Cavaliers and Economists examines how popular modes of literary production in the South emerged in tandem with the region's economic modernization.
