Plantation tradition is a genre of literature based in the southern states of the USA that is heavily nostalgic for antebellum times.
The decades before the American Civil War saw several works idealizing the plantation, such as John Pendleton Kennedy's 1832 The Swallow Barn. However, plantation tradition became more popular in the late-nineteenth century as a reaction against slave narratives like those of Frederick Douglass, and abolitionist novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin. Prominent writers in the plantation tradition include Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922) and Harry Stillwell Edwards (1855-1938). Other writers, especially African-American writers, soon satirized the genre: Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899), for example, "consciously evoke the conventions of the plantation novel only to subvert them".
Famous quotes containing the words plantation and/or tradition:
“Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kow-tow before any United States pro-consul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”
—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)