Southern Literature From 1579-1895: A comprehensive review, with copious extracts and criticisms; for the use of schools and the general reader

by Manly, Louise (1857–1936)

Public domain · free to read · 21,449 downloads on Project Gutenberg

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American LiteratureHistory - AmericanTeaching & EducationAmerican literature -- Southern StatesAmerican literature -- Southern states -- History and criticismSouthern States -- In literature

About this book

Most anthologies of American literature are tilted north. Louise Manly’s 1895 collection is a corrective—a deliberate, generous gathering of Southern writing from the colonial period through the late nineteenth century. It’s not a novel; it’s a window into a region’s literary voice before the Civil War and after. For a restless reader, the value is in the sampling: short poems, letters, speeches, and excerpts. You can dip in for five minutes and emerge with a sense of how people in the South actually wrote and thought—formal, ornate, often defensive, sometimes startlingly direct.

This is a book where the *variety* is the point, but the density of 19th-century prose can be a wall. FocusReader’s **pomodoro sprints** are your best friend here: read one extract in a ten-minute block, then stop. Use **anchor emphasis** to hold a single line from a speech or poem if your eye wants to skip ahead. The **read-aloud** feature with sentence-sync is especially useful for dialect-heavy passages—hearing them spoken makes the rhythm clear.

One honest note: Manly’s selections reflect the Lost Cause ideology common to her era. The book romanticizes the antebellum South and includes no Black authors. It’s a document of its time, not a balanced history. Read it to understand a perspective, not to get the full story.