Help Me Find the Quotation!

vegasgeorge

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Aug 26, 2018
Years ago, I watched a Shelby Foote interview in which he illustrated the difference between the antebellum societies of the North and South by reference to what they were typically reading at the time. As I recall, Southerners were said to be reading some romantic, heroic, novel about chivalry, while Northerners were reading some hard hitting contemporary social criticism of political significance. I can't remember if it something that Foote originated, or if he was quoting someone else.

Dose this ring a bell? Can you tell me what it was?

Thanks!
 
Years ago, I watched a Shelby Foote interview in which he illustrated the difference between the antebellum societies of the North and South by reference to what they were typically reading at the time. As I recall, Southerners were said to be reading some romantic, heroic, novel about chivalry, while Northerners were reading some hard hitting contemporary social criticism of political significance. I can't remember if it something that Foote originated, or if he was quoting someone else.

Dose this ring a bell? Can you tell me what it was?

Thanks!

Definitely rings a bell!

I can't find the quote but I think the gist of it was that Southerners were reading romanticist novels by the likes of Sir Walter Scott (as @Coonewah Creek replied with 'Ivanhoe') and Alexandre Dumas, while the North was reading free-thinking American authors like Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne.
 
Funny how the brain works! I now think I remember the quote, but since I still haven't found it, I can't be sure. I think Foote said: "Northerners were reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and waxing apoplectic over slavery, while southerners were reading Ivanhoe and dreaming of chivalry." That sounds about right. Let me know if you find the source. Thanks again!
 
An examination of library holdings, both private and public, in the South for 1860 show that most people read religious books, books on agriculture, on housekeeping, and novels were toward the bottom of the list. The Children of Pride is a collection of letters from members of a large Georgia family and shows what they read. The War Outside My Window, published in 2018, shows what a young teenager in Georgia was reading during the war. No Sir Walter Scott, no chivalric novels.
 
Quote from Shelby Foote in the novel Shiloh:
“for men who a short time before had been shooting at him and doing all in their power to wreck his cause, I remembered what my father had said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy being conceived already moribund. We were sick from an old malady, he said: incurable romanticism and misplaced chivalry, too much Walter Scott and Dumas read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.”​
 
Scott was certainly well-known in the South (he was enormously popular in the country as a whole, for that matter). Checking one newspaper archive for 1830-60, I find 8,985 mentions of Sir Walter, of which 4,424 were from 9 southern states, and fully 3,175 from South Carolina. This "proves" only that Scott and his work was well known. Many libraries of the time were church-supported, and often "frivolous novels" were rejected. You would find few romantic novels in antebellum northern libraries either, public or private ... though finding what people were actually reading is not so easy.

Whether or not Clemens' assertion of the influence of romantic, "chivalric" novels in the South is accurate, is another question. The so-called southern "honor culture," certainly does seem to reflect romantic literary notions.
 
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Charles Dickens was very popular in the South as he was in the rest of North America and England.
 
Quote from Shelby Foote in the novel Shiloh:
“for men who a short time before had been shooting at him and doing all in their power to wreck his cause, I remembered what my father had said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy being conceived already moribund. We were sick from an old malady, he said: incurable romanticism and misplaced chivalry, too much Walter Scott and Dumas read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.”​

That is amazing and powerful...glad you could put your finger on it
 
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