88 American Literature
Lectual shift in that period- a sliding of the plates, as it were. Rayburn S. Moore’s introduction to this period is by contrast puzzlingly brief; he wants us to see the heart of the period elsewhere: “Interest in the community, the land and the people in it- the poor white and the black man as well as the planter- and the language of all levels…suggests ties with the part of Simms and Longstreet and also looks forward to the work of Faulkner, Wolfe, Warren, and Welty” (p. 177). This imposition of the mimetic definition demonstrates how the omission of history automatic to the mimetic strategy silently occurs: the work of the period itself falls out of sight between two other periods and loses its own historical context.
Southern writing in these years underwent reconstruction and redefinition, and the architects were not exclusively native sons and daughters familiar with the “land and the people on it.” Henry Adams, Henry James, John W. DeForest and others wrote significant works of southern literature during this period- as, in fact, did Harriet Beecher Stowe in the earlier era. Editors at Scribner’s (later the Century), Harper’s Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Arena, and others pronounced, in their pages and private letters, a formula for the rehabilitation of the South through the reconstruction of its literary history and its current creative production. The reconciliation romance, for example, so popular with gilded-age audiences and so easy to skewer these days, was, in the minds of several influential editors, a programmatic adaptations of Lessing’s literary strategy for the reunification of Germany. See Auerbach’s Mimesis for a brief discussion of the play, Minna van Barnhelm, that one of Cable’s editors at the Century, Robert Underwood Johnson, recommended to his attention as the ideal pattern for southern literary work of the reconstruction period. Gender, race, class, and national ideology came to bear on Cable, and his fellow southern writers, in overt ways probably not duplicated in the history of southern literature. It is unfortunate to miss this complex phase of southern
P. xii
Johnson’s letter to Cable, 2 Dec. 1879, is to be found in the George Washington Cable collection of the Tulane University Library. I have quoted it with permission in “After the War: Romance and the Reconstruction of Southern Literature,” in Philip Castille and William Osborne, eds., Southern Literature in Transition: Heritage and Promise (Memphis: Memphis State Univ. Press, 1983), p. 121