In this history of intellectual life, Michael O'Brien analyzes the lives and works of antebellum Southern thinkers and in so doing reintegrates the South into the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history. O'Brien finds that the evolution of Southern intellectual life paralleled and modified developments across the Atlantic by moving from a late Enlightenment sensibility to Romanticism and, lastly, to an early form of realism. Volume 1 describes the social underpinnings of the Southern intellect by examining patterns of travel and migration; the formation of ideas on race, gender, ethnicity, locality, and class; and the structures of discourse, expressed in manuscripts and print culture. In Volume 2, O'Brien looks at the genres that became characteristic of Southern thought. Throughout, he pays careful attention to the many individuals who fashioned the Southern mind, including John C. Calhoun, Louisa McCord, James Henley Thornwell, and George Fitzhugh. Placing the South in the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history while recovering the contributions of numerous influential thinkers and writers, O'Brien's masterwork demonstrates the sophistication and complexity of Southern intellectual life before 1860.
- ISBN10 0807863734
- ISBN13 9780807863732
- Publish Date 15 December 2005 (first published 29 March 2004)
- Publish Status Unknown
- Out of Print 23 April 2014
- Publish Country US
- Imprint The University of North Carolina Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 1360
- Language English