| dc.description.abstract | Infected Regions: Marriage Metaphors and Illness Plots in Antebellum Cross-Regional Fiction extends the timeline for regional fiction to the antebellum era, widening the critical lens enabling the recovery of many once-popular novels. As early as three decades before the start of the Civil War, the writers in this study produced fiction that provides today¿s scholars insight about existing regional, social, and racial anxieties that destabilized national unity. I maintain that during these unstable decades regional tensions between the North and the South prompted a regional subgenre I call ¿cross-regional fiction¿ and a rhetorical trope I call ¿the illness plot.¿ The authors who make up this study all held claim to a multi-regional identity and wrote fiction in which characters crossed into unfamiliar locations seeking to uncover provincial prejudices. Analyzing these texts as examples of Body Politic rhetoric, I demonstrate how these writers metaphorically alluded to existing tensions as a national illness and incorporated sick, allegorical characters to disrupt marriage alliances, ultimately leading to North/South marriage unions. These unions symbolize healing and illustrate that building cultural understanding across the North and the South could heal regional discord and strengthen national unity. In generating definitions for cross-regional fiction and illness plots, I selected novels with both marriage and illness plots involving couples from two contentious regions¿the North and South¿and inspired by three critical eras leading up to the Civil War: The Nullification Crisis of the 1830s, the Financial Crisis of 1837, and the slavery debates of the 1850s. The primary texts for this analysis include William A. Caruthers¿s The Kentuckian in New York (1834), Catharine Sedgwick¿s The Linwoods (1835), Maria McIntosh¿s The Lofty and the Lowly (1853), and Caroline Lee Hentz¿s The Planter¿s Northern Bride (1854). This fiction provided antebellum readers and writers a dialogical space where opposing regions could, theoretically, come together and work out, or rather act out, their differences. | |
