Plantation tradition is a genre of literature, based in the southern states of the USA, heavily nostalgic for antebellum times. Although several works idealizing the plantation were written in the decades before the American Civil War, plantation tradition became more popular in the late nineteenth century through the works of Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922). Other writers, especially African-American writers, soon satirized the genre. Antebellum is a Latin word meaning before the war. In United States history and historiography Antebellum is sometimes used instead of the term pre-Civil War, especially in the South. ... The American Civil War was fought in the United States from 1861 until 1865 between the United States – forces coming mostly from the 23 northern states of the Union – and the newly-formed Confederate States of America, which consisted of 11 southern states that had declared their secession. ... Thomas Nelson Page (b. ...
External links
Plantation Tradition in Local Color Fiction (http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/plant.htm)
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This "plantation mythology," analyzed in Gaines's The Southern Plantation (1924), has by now become a cliche of historical romances like Gone With The Wind, but its origins are to be found in the early 19th century.
Plantations are seen in these books as places where slaves do manual labor, and whites leisurely manage and supervise.
Large plantations worked by slaves were concentrated in a few areas along the coastal plain, particularly in Virginia and South Carolina, and, eventually, in the lower Mississippi valley: in these places the economy was oriented around one or two cash crops (tobacco, cotton, sugar cane, indigo, rice).
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