Imagining Home Rule
Imagining Home Rule
This chapter examines South Carolina narratives of the Reconstruction. Early South Carolina fiction based on Reconstruction was addressed primarily to southerners rather than northerners, drawing creative energy from recognition that the resistance movement had significant potential for conflicts among its different elements. The solutions proposed for these problems sometimes included more pointed social criticism than might be expected. Schematization of home rule as an endpoint for Reconstruction fiction outlined the possibilities imagined by early postwar South Carolina writers. Some novels culminated in the protagonist reclaiming a home from which he or she has been displaced while other books ended with a spotlighted couple’s decision to make a new home. In a final variation, the heroine and hero concluded by renouncing their permanent home. This framework may not be equally useful in other contexts. But in the case of South Carolina fiction written during or shortly after Reconstruction, it effectively clarifies distinctions along a spectrum of restoration and reform.
Keywords: fiction, Reconstruction, narratives, South Carolina writers, social order
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