Book excerpt: "The year 1870 marks an epoch in the history of the South. It witnessed not only the death of Robert E. Lee but the passing also of John Pendleton Kennedy, George Denison Prentice, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, and William Gilmore Simms. In literature it was not only the end of the old but the beginning of the new, for in 1870 the new movement in Southern literature may be said to have been inaugurated in the work of Irwin Russell. I have attempted elsewhere to trace briefly the chronological outlines of this literature from 1870 to the present time. In this paper, therefore, I shall discuss not the history of this literature but rather the history in this literature." -An excerpt