Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
Swallow Barn : A Novel - John Pendleton Kennedy

Swallow Barn

A Novel

By: John Pendleton Kennedy

Paperback | 1 April 1986

At a Glance

Paperback


$44.00

or 4 interest-free payments of $11.00 with

 or 

Ships in 5 to 7 business days

Originally published in 1832 and revised in 1851, Swallow Barn, John Pendleton Kennedy's novel of antebellum life on a tidewater Virginia plantation, was described by its author as "variously and interchangeably partaking of the complexion of a book of travels, a diary, a collection of letters, a drama, and a history." Swallow Barn has returned from oblivion many times in the past 150 years, in part because it resists categorization and retains its originality. It is a novel that is not a novel, written by a man who was and was not a southerner or even, by his own reckoning, a writer.

Swallow Barn began as a series of letters written by a Mark Littleton (Kennedy) to his hometown neighbor, Zachary Huddlestone of Preston Ridge, New York. Littleton, visiting his Virginia relatives at their farm called Swallow Barn, on the James River not far from Richmond, told his friend that he would write a "full, true and particular account of all my doings, or rather my seeings and thinkings" while he was among his genial relatives. But Kennedy soon dropped the pose of letter writer and devoted successive chapters to sketches of Virginia country life. In choosing to write about the "manners" of his own region, he won not only esteem as an American author but recognition for a way of life toward which an open hostility was developing in the North.

Lucinda MacKethan's introduction to this edition considers biographical information and the cultural and literary forces that operated to make Swallow Barn a unique as well as a representative product of its period. MacKethan also discusses Kennedy's design for the novel, the ideological and artistic strategies that governed the choices and changes he made as he created what is now regarded as one of the most important fictional portrayals of plantation society by one intimately involved in that place and time.

More in Literary Studies from 1800 to 1900

The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective - Sara Lodge
Pride and Prejudice : Oxford World's Classics - Jane Austen

RRP $15.95

$12.75

20%
OFF
Middlemarch : Collins Classics - George Eliot
Jane Austen in 50 Words - Maria Frawley
Moby Dick : Collins Classics - Herman Melville
Wordsworth's Trauma and Poetry : 1793-1803 - Richard E. Matlak
Keeping Time : Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar - Kristen Case
Flatland : Penguin Science Fiction - Edwin Abbott

RRP $24.99

$21.75

13%
OFF
Jane Austen in 50 Words - Maria  Frawley

RRP $90.00

$77.99

13%
OFF