A rage for order: The ideological implications of form in early Southern writing
Description
Selected Roanoke and Jamestown writings dominate this study of the form of early Southern writing. Texts from the Revolutionary period by Thomas Jefferson and John Filson and from pre-Civil War Virginia by Nathaniel Beverly Tucker complete the study. The study proposes that form, the tangible product of a desire to order experience, has ideological implication. Each text implies a form to which reality, more specifically society, should conform A variety of forms characterizes the Roanoke and Jamestown texts. The former are comic or tragic, their implications radical or conservative. They suggest that the structure of society in Virginia either duplicate the English class structure or differ radically, organized instead around those whom experience, knowledge, and ability advance. The Jamestown texts, in which romance dominates, qualify these implications. These texts suggest that duplicating the English social structure will fail because that structure cannot adapt to the complexities of American experience. Instead, the most radically subversive of the texts proposes a society lead by an historically transcendent self dependent on experience. The Revolutionary Era texts are comic, but differ in implication. To absorb social change, Jefferson favors an educated agricultural society. But the analytical self that his text reveals confirms that society is the product of a delicate balance between the authorizing individual and the social group. Finally, Tucker's unfinished comic novel proposes a society located in a selfless past which refuses to acknowledge experience and to admit change Overall, the texts suggest a tendency to comedy at times of severe cultural stress. Their writers seek to reverse the process of history and restore a purer time anterior to the threatening change. Typically, these comic texts fail to acknowledge change or to envision society adapting to threats. These failures to imply in the texts the successful integration of society forecast a similar failure in the social order The study relies on Northrop Frye's theory of myths, on Hayden White's 'tropological modes' and, to a much lesser extent, on classical Aristotelian rhetoric