SOURCE: Gray, Richard. “Holding the Line in the Old South.” In Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region, pp. 31-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Gray studies the antebellum novels of William Gilmore Simms and his contemporaries as they valorize the South while occasionally depicting the region as slowly but continuously disintegrating.

To Speak of Arcadia: William Gilmore Simms and Some Plantation Novelists

At the time when people like [John C.] Calhoun, [Jefferson] Davis, and [Alexander] Stephens were attempting a political defence of their region, another group of men were responding in a rather different (if analogous) way to the South's search for an identity. Being storytellers, they did not pretend that the people they talked about actually existed somewhere. But being serious storytellers, they did presume on a kind of imaginative truth; that is to say, they did believe they were exposing and...