Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation

ISBN-13: 9780195189087 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 448 str.

Rhys Isaac

Opis

Landon Carter, a Virginia planter, left behind one of the most revealing of all American diaries. In this astonishingly rich biography, Isaac mines this remarkable document--and many other sources--to reconstruct Carter's interior world as it plunged into revolution.
The aging patriarch, though a fierce supporter of American liberty, was deeply troubled by the rebellion and its threat to established order. His diary, originally a record of plantation business, began to fill with angry stories of revolt in his own little kingdom. Carter writes at white heat, his words sputtering from his pen as he documents the terrible rupture that the Revolution meant to him. Indeed, Carter felt in his heart that he was chronicling a world in decline, the passing of the order that his revered father had bequeathed to him. Not only had Landon's king betrayed his subjects, but Landon's own household betrayed him: his son showed insolent defiance, his daughter Judith eloped with a forbidden suitor, all of his slaves conspired constantly, and eight of them made an armed exodus to freedom. The seismic upheaval he helped to start had crumbled the foundations of Carter's own home.
In Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom Rhys Isaac unfolds not only the life, but also the mental world of our countrymen in a long-distant time. Moreover, in this presentation of Landon Carter's passionate narratives, the diarist becomes an arresting new character in the world's literature, a figure of Shakespearean proportions, the Lear of his own tragic kingdom. This long-awaited work will be seen both as a major contribution to Revolution history and a triumph of the art of biography.

Recenzje

"Landon Carter's diary is an unedited literary masterpiece full of Faulknerian stories. Now it has found a worthy editor and commentator in Rhys Isaac, a great storyteller in his own right. The result is a fascinating tale of public storms and personal furies that illuminates not only the dying world of the eighteenth century slaveholder but the dawning age of democratic revolution. Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom is itself a literary and historical masterpiece." —John Gillis, Rutgers University, author of A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Legenc and the Quest for Family Values

O autorze

Rhys Isaac is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the College of William and Mary and a Research Associate of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790. An Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, he lives in Melbourne, Australia.