| Abstract |
The present paper is an attempt to investigate what cultural self-image of the South Allen Tate creates in one of his biographical works about Confederate generals, Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier.... In the biography Tate states provocatively his reactionary views about the Old South in vindication of slavery and its political action which, in his opinion, is based on the orthodoxy of the Constitution, while he criticizes the lack of historical sense and the abstract concept of freedom in the North. However, Tate does not praise wholeheartedly the legendary, mythical image of the Old South. A narrow examination of the characterization of Stonewall Jackson, who is mythologized as a heroic embodiment of martial spirit, reveals that Tate constructs Jackson’s character as opposed to the modern man who feels insecure and unstable due to the loss of a traditional order. Keenly aware of the modernistic fissure in his own identity, Tate projects onto the portrait of Jackson his desire to achieve a total fusion of thinking, feeling, and action by restoring tradition and order, although he is conscious of its impossibility. By the same token, Tate’s desire for tradition and order can be detected in his apparent vindication of the Old South. It is possible, therefore, to find a self-portrait of Tate’s own inner landscape in the biography, which enables us to detect a double-layered cultural self-image of the South in the palimpsest space between the surface and the depth of the text.show more
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