The American South in Pictures

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 1996 im Fachbereich Amerikanistik - Kultur und Landeskunde, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to show how southern life in the late 18th and first half of the 19th century is manifested in artistic accomplishments of and about that period. Special attention is paid to the methods used by painters and writers in creating their very own pictures of the South. The first section gives an overview of painting at that time; the popular genres, subjects and techniques are discussed to demonstrate the role of painting in the region. Occasionally, records of descriptions of the same object by a writer and by a painter have been preserved. Section II looks at two of those "dual" records and compares the techniques employed by either artist to state their respective intention and their effects on the modern viewer. In section III, Thomas Nelson Page‘s In Ole Virginia, especially "No Haid Pawn", is analyzed, concentrating on the impression the Old South leaves on the reader who did not personally experience this time, and to the methods Page used to "draw" his picture. It includes references to paintings from the ante-bellum period that deal with the life of blacks in the Old South as this is one of the major subjects of Page‘s stories.