Main description:

In 19th century plantation literature, the runaway slave in the swamp was a recurring "bogey-man" whose presence challenged myths of the plantation system. By escaping to the swamps with its wild and threatening connotations, the runaway gained an invisibility that was more threatening to the institution than open rebellion. In part, the proslavery plantation novel served to transform that image of the free slave in the swamp from its untouchable, abstract state to a form that could be possessed, understood, and controlled. Essentially, writers defending the institution would conjure forth the rebellious image in order to dispel it safely.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Introduction: Into the Dismal Swamp; Identity and the Dynamics of Space; Chapter 2 Sambo, Nat, and the Gentleman Planter: Notions of Self on the Plantation; Chapter 3 The Slave in the Swamp: Claiming Space; Chapter 4 John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn and the Birth of Plantation Literature; Literary Swamps of the 1850s; Chapter 5 Proslavery Writers in the Wake of Uncle Tom's Cabin; Chapter 6 African American Views of the Swamp: Slave Narratives and Early Fiction; Chapter 7 Stowe's Dred and the Discourse of Violence in the 1850s; Reconciliation and Lost Cause; Chapter 8 Dredging the Swamps: Joel Chandler Harris and the Packaging of African American Folklore; Chapter 9 The Cult of the Lost Cause and Thomas Nelson Pages "No Haid Pawn"; Chapter 10 George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes and Plantation Narrative(s); Chapter 11 Conclusion: The Body of the Maroon;