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...