Messing with Romance is a reinvestigation of southern literary history and a case study in the
potentials of genre criticism. Offering contextualized readings of novels produced by
representatives of the southern elite between 1824 and 1854 the study traces a development
that is as fascinating as it is contradictory: from pretences of realism to bold fantasies of
fiction's socially transformative power and eventually toward the collapse of the discourse of
romance to which southern novelists had contributed with such desperate determination. Along
the way prominent critical clichés come under scrutiny: firstly that antebellum southern
literature followed a clear-cut course of radicalization secondly that literary conventions
can easily be identified as the determining formats of ideological discourses.
