Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860
An Abridged Edition of Conjectures of Order
Michael O'Brien
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 06/2010
Pages: 400
Subject: History
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807895641
DESCRIPTION
Here O'Brien succinctly and fluidly surveys the lives and works of many significant Southern intellectuals, including John C. Calhoun, Louisa McCord, James Henley Thornwell, and George Fitzhugh. Looking over the period, O'Brien identifies a movement from Enlightenment ideas of order to a Romanticism concerned with the ambivalences of personal and social identity, and finally, by the 1850s, to an early realist sensibility. He offers a new understanding of the South by describing a place neither monolithic nor out of touch, but conflicted, mobile, and ambitious to integrate modern intellectual developments into its tense and idiosyncratic social experience.