SOURCE: MacKethan, Lucinda Hardwick. “Plantation Fiction, 1865-1900.” In The History of Southern Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 209-18. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

In the following essay, MacKethan explores the rhetorical and structural techniques used by writers of the New South in their representation of old plantation myths.

The literary phenomenon of the Old South, centered in the image of plantation culture, was the creation of writers pursuing careers in a very different South, dubbed “new” in economic, social, and political as well as literary structures. Thomas Nelson Page, the most durable of the post-Civil War plantation romancers, might assert that “the New South is … simply the Old South with its energies directed into new lines”; however, it was solely the newness of those lines that encouraged post-bellum admirers of the plantation to turn a defeated way of life into a substantial legend. The...