Dictionary

moonlight-and-magnolia en · ADJ

Meanings

1. (not-comparable) Of or relating to romanticized historical portrayals of the American South, often depicting slavery in a positive light.
   • If a white employer could take so much interest in the child of a black employee, in whom he had no property interest, that would illustrate—as did Hentz's other fiction—the moonlight and magnolia world of Southerners' concern for their slaves. 2016, Alfred L. Brophy, University, Court, and Slave, page 84:
   • Here the myth of a moonlight-and-magnolia South founders on dry empirical realities. 2013, David Chinitz, Which Sin to Bear?, page 34:
   • The romantic South of myth and legend, the “moonlight and magnolia” South with which plantation epics captured the national imagination in the era of the Lost Cause, has acquired a nightmarish quality; […] 2014, Cynthia Stretch, Cristina Alsina Rísquez, Innocence and Loss, page 33: