This title places the Old South in the history of Western thought. This volume is an abridgement of Michael O'Brien's award-winning two-volume intellectual history of the Old South, "Conjectures of Order", which depicts a culture that was simultaneously national, postcolonial, and imperial, influenced by European intellectual traditions, yet also deeply implicated in the making of the American mind. 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.
- ISBN13 9780807834008
- Publish Date 1 June 2010
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 11 June 2013
- Publish Country US
- Imprint The University of North Carolina Press
- Edition New edition
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 400
- Language English