First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama

Contents

Contents Acknowledgments IX Introduction Literature and Culture in Early Alabama 1 1. Satire in the Territories Literature and the Art of Political Payback in an Early Alabama Classic 14 2. First Book Henry Hitchcock's Alabama Justice ofthe Peace 23 3. "The First Production of the Kind, in the South" A Backwoods Literary Incognito and His Attempt at the Great American Novel 32 4. Belles Lettres in a New Country 47 5. Antebellum Alabama History in the Planter Style The Example of Albert J. Pickett 63 6. A. B. Meek's Great American Epic Poem of 1855; or, the Curious Career of The Red Eagle 76 7. Historicizing Alabama's Southwestern Humorists; or, How the Times Were Served by Johnson J. Hooper and Joseph G. Baldwin 87 8. Caroline Lee Hentz's Anti-Abolitionist Double Feature and Augusta Jane Evans's New and Improved Novel of Female Education 102 vii viii ----' CONTENTS 9. Alabama's Last First Book The Example of Daniel Hundley 127 Notes 137 Works Cited 171 Index 177 ...