The Humor of the Old South

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Author :
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813185459
Total Pages : 484 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

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Book Synopsis The Humor of the Old South by : M. Thomas Inge

Download or read book The Humor of the Old South written by M. Thomas Inge and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The humor of the Old South—tales, almanac entries, turf reports, historical sketches, gentlemen's essays on outdoor sports, profiles of local characters—flourished between 1830 and 1860. The genre's popularity and influence can be traced in the works of major southern writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Harry Crews, as well as in contemporary popular culture focusing on the rural South. This collection of essays includes some of the past twenty five years' best writing on the subject, as well as ten new works bringing fresh insights and original approaches to the subject. A number of the essays focus on well known humorists such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, William Tappan Thompson, and George Washington Harris, all of whom have long been recognized as key figures in Southwestern humor. Other chapters examine the origins of this early humor, in particular selected poems of William Henry Timrod and Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which anticipate the subject matter, character types, structural elements, and motifs that would become part of the Southwestern tradition. Renditions of "Sleepy Hollow" were later echoed in sketches by William Tappan Thompson, Joseph Beckman Cobb, Orlando Benedict Mayer, Francis James Robinson, and William Gilmore Simms. Several essays also explore antebellum southern humor in the context of race and gender. This literary legacy left an indelible mark on the works of later writers such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner, whose works in a comic vein reflect affinities and connections to the rich lode of materials initially popularized by the Southwestern humorists.

Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor

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Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton
ISBN 13 : 9780393036954
Total Pages : 668 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (369 download)

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Book Synopsis Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor by : Roy Blount

Download or read book Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor written by Roy Blount and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 1994 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A treasury of contemporary Southern humor includes more than 150 stories, sketches, essays, poems, memoirs, and song lyrics from William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Zora Neal Hurston, Dave Barry, and other contributors

Southern Frontier Humor

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Author :
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1617037699
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Southern Frontier Humor by : Ed Piacentino

Download or read book Southern Frontier Humor written by Ed Piacentino and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-05-06 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its inception in the early 1830s, southern frontier humor (also known as the humor of the Old Southwest) has had enduring appeal. The onset of the new millennium precipitated an impressive rejuvenation of scholarly interest. Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches represents the next step in this revival, providing a series of essays with fresh perspectives and contexts. First, the book shows the importance of Henry Junius Nott, a virtually unknown and forgotten writer who mined many of the principal subjects, themes, tropes, and character types associated with southern frontier humor, followed by an essay addressing how this humor genre and its ideological impact helped to stimulate a national cultural revolution. Several essays focus on the genre’s legacy to the post-Civil War era, exploring intersections between southern frontier humor and southern local color writers—Joel Chandler Harris, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Sherwood Bonner. Mark Twain’s African American dialect piece “A True Story,” though employing some of the conventions of southern frontier humor, is reexamined as a transitional text, showing his shift to broader concerns, particularly in race portraiture. Essays also examine the evolution of the trickster from the Jack Tales to Hooper’s Simon Suggs to similar mountebanks in novels of John Kennedy Toole, Mark Childress, and Clyde Edgerton and transnational contexts, the latter exploring parallels between southern frontier humor and the Jamaican Anansi tales. Finally, the genre is situated contextually, using contemporary critical discourses, which are applied to G. W. Harris’s Sut Lovingood and to various frontier hunting stories.

With the Bark On

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780826518880
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (188 download)

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Book Synopsis With the Bark On by : John Q. Anderson

Download or read book With the Bark On written by John Q. Anderson and published by . This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now back in print: A collection of old Southern humor. Reissue.

The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor

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Author :
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807130865
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (38 download)

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Book Synopsis The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor by : Edward Piacentino

Download or read book The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor written by Edward Piacentino and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-02-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Old Southwest flourished between 1830 and 1860, but its brand of humor lives on in the writings of Mark Twain, the novels of William Faulkner, the television series The Beverly Hillbillies, the material of comedian Jeff Foxworthy, and even cyberspace, where nonsoutherners can come up to speed on subjects like hickphonics. The first book on its subject, The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor engages topics ranging from folklore to feminism to the Internet as it pays tribute to a distinctly American comic style that has continued to reinvent itself. The book begins by examining frontier southern humor as manifested in works of Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Woody Guthrie, Harry Crews, William Price Fox, Fred Chappell, Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, and African American writers Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, and Yusef Komunyakaa. It then explores southwestern humor’s legacy in popular culture—including comic strips, comedians, and sitcoms—and on the Internet. Many of the trademark themes of modern and contemporary southern wit appeared in stories that circulated in the antebellum Southwest. Often taking the form of tall tales, those stories have served and continue to serve as rich, reusable material for southern writers and entertainers in the twentieth century and beyond. The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor is an innovative collaboration that delves into jokes about hunting, drinking, boasting, and gambling as it studies, among other things, the styles of comedians Andy Griffith, Dave Gardner, and Justin Wilson. It gives splendid demonstration that through the centuries southern humor has continued to be a powerful tool for disarming hypocrites and opening up sensitive issues for discussion.

Reflections of the Civil War in Southern Humor

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Author :
Publisher : NewSouth Books
ISBN 13 : 1603063927
Total Pages : 104 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis Reflections of the Civil War in Southern Humor by : Wade Hall

Download or read book Reflections of the Civil War in Southern Humor written by Wade Hall and published by NewSouth Books. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As one of the organic forms of literature, humor has always responded to and reflected the needs of the people at a given time, and the Civil War and its aftermath were days of the South's greatest need. Historians have suggested many reasons for the South's fearless stand against "overwhelming numbers and resources," to use General Lee's words. In this short study, author and historian Wade Hall adds one reason to the list: the humor of the Southerner -- as soldier and civilian -- during the war and the bleak days that followed it. The South arose from the ashes of humiliation and defeat smiling -- though sometimes through tears. The Southerner's sense of humor helped him to fight a war he believed honorable and to accept the bitter defeat which ended it. Without the escape valve of humor, many a "rebel" would have succumbed to despair. The Southerner could smile wistfully as he looked back on a proud past and hopefully as he looked forward to an uncertain future. He smiled because he read humorists like Bill Arp, who once wrote somewhat serio-comically that the South was "conquered but not convinced." In this study, Hall has attempted to represent all the types of humor written in the South between the beginning of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I, specifically 1861 and 1914, including war memoirs, novels, plays, short stories, poetry, and songs. After a survey of humor written during the war, Hall discusses the soldier, the Negro, the poor white, and the "folks at home" in wartime, as they are reflected in the postwar humor.

Creating an Old South

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Author :
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807860034
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Creating an Old South by : Edward E. Baptist

Download or read book Creating an Old South written by Edward E. Baptist and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-04-03 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set on the antebellum southern frontier, this book uses the history of two counties in Florida's panhandle to tell the story of the migrations, disruptions, and settlements that made the plantation South. Soon after the United States acquired Florida from Spain in 1821, migrants from older southern states began settling the land that became Jackson and Leon Counties. Slaves, torn from family and community, were forced to carve plantations from the woods of Middle Florida, while planters and less wealthy white men battled over the social, political, and economic institutions of their new society. Conflict between white men became full-scale crisis in the 1840s, but when sectional conflict seemed to threaten slavery, the whites of Middle Florida found common ground. In politics and everyday encounters, they enshrined the ideal of white male equality--and black inequality. To mask their painful memories of crisis, the planter elite told themselves that their society had been transplanted from older states without conflict. But this myth of an "Old," changeless South only papered over the struggles that transformed slave society in the course of its expansion. In fact, that myth continues to shroud from our view the plantation frontier, the very engine of conflict that had led to the myth's creation.

Southern Frontier Humor

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Author :
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
ISBN 13 : 0826272207
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (262 download)

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Book Synopsis Southern Frontier Humor by : Thomas Inge

Download or read book Southern Frontier Humor written by Thomas Inge and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2010-05-12 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If, as some suggest, American literature began with Huckleberry Finn, then the humorists of the Old South surely helped us to shape that literature. Twain himself learned to write by reading the humorists’ work, and later writers were influenced by it. This book marks the first new collection of humor from that region published in fifteen years—and the first fresh selection of sketches and tales to appear in over forty years. Thomas Inge and Ed Piacentino bring their knowledge of and fondness for this genre to a collection that reflects the considerable body of scholarship that has been published on its major figures and the place of the movement in American literary history. They breathe new life into the subject, gathering a new selection of texts and adding Twain—the only major American author to contribute to and emerge from the movement—as well as several recently identified humorists. All of the major writers are represented, from Augustus Baldwin Longstreet to Thomas Bangs Thorpe, as well as a great many lesser-known figures like Hamilton C. Jones, Joseph M. Field, and John S. Robb. The anthology also includes several writers only recently discovered to be a part of the tradition, such as Joseph Gault, Christopher Mason Haile, James Edward Henry, and Marcus Lafayette Byrn, and features authors previously overlooked, such as William Gilmore Simms, Ham Jones, Orlando Benedict Mayer, and Adam Summer. Selections are timely, reflecting recent trends in literary history and criticism sensitive to issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. The editors have also taken pains to seek out first printings to avoid the kinds of textual corruptions that often occur in later versions of these sketches. Southern Frontier Humor offers students and general readers alike a broad perspective and new appreciation of this singular form of writing from the Old South—and provides some chuckles along the way.

Fetching the Old Southwest

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Publisher : University of Missouri Press
ISBN 13 : 9780826264176
Total Pages : 616 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (641 download)

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Book Synopsis Fetching the Old Southwest by : James H. Justus

Download or read book Fetching the Old Southwest written by James H. Justus and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For more than a quarter-century, despite the admirable excavations that have unearthed such humorists as John Gorman Barr and Marcus Lafayette, the most significant of the humorists from the Old Southwest have remained the same: Crockett, Longstreet, Thompson, Baldwin, Thorpe, Hooper, Robb, Harris, and Lewis. Forming a kind of shadow canon in American literature that led to Mark Twain's early work, from 1834 to 1867 these authors produced a body of writing that continues to reward attentive readers." "James H. Justus's Fetching the Old Southwest examines this writing in the context of other discourses contemporaneous with it: travel books, local histories, memoirs, and sports manuals, as well as unpublished private forms such as personal correspondence, daybooks, and journals. Like most writing, humor is a product of its place and time, and the works studied herein are no exception. The antebellum humorists provide an important look into the social and economic conditions that were prevalent in the southern "new country," a place that would, in time, become the Deep South." "While previous books about Old Southwest humor have focused on individual authors, Justus has produced the first critical study to encompass all of the humor from this time period. Teachers and students of literary history will appreciate the incredible range of documentation, both primary and secondary."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Counterfeit Gentlemen

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Publisher : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 0813059364
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Counterfeit Gentlemen by : John Mayfield

Download or read book Counterfeit Gentlemen written by John Mayfield and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2009-03-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be a man in the pre–Civil War South? And how can we answer the question from the perspective of the early twenty-first century? John Mayfield does so by revealing how early nineteenth-century Southern humorists addressed the anxieties felt by men seeking to chart a new path between the old honor culture and the new market culture. Lacking the constraints imposed by journalism or proper literature, these writers created fictional worlds where manhood and identity could be tested and explored.

The Civilization of the Old South

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Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813194490
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

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Book Synopsis The Civilization of the Old South by : Clement Eaton

Download or read book The Civilization of the Old South written by Clement Eaton and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exhibiting a clear, straightforward style, his many works are marked by a comprehensiveness and a catholicity of view. There is hardly an element of southern thought or society, hardly a major movement of any kind or an event of any significance that has escaped his penetrating thought and discerning analysis. This volume of Eaton's selected writings forms a rich and provocative mosaic of southern life from the years of Thomas Jefferson to the close of the Civil War. These selections, perceptively edited by Albert D. Kinvan, 'show the wide range of Eaton's interests, including the impact of slavery, the influence of religion, and the art of politics, and they demonstrate the depth of his insight into the civilization of the Old South.

Humor of the Old Southwest

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Author :
Publisher : Greenwood
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Humor of the Old Southwest by :

Download or read book Humor of the Old Southwest written by and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1989-11-16 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the early part of the nineteenth century, the Southwestern frontier moved from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, through Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, to Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana. Using a variety of styles and subjects, humorists in the frontier states of the Southwest wrote tall tales and humorous stories that made use of dialect and emphasized cruelty, violence, and depravity, in rebellion against the sentimental morality of conventional literature. Such tales flourished from 1835 through 1861 and helped buffer the pioneers during their everyday hardships. The humorists' stories, though exaggerated, were often rooted in the real characters and incidents of the frontier and as such serve as a social history of the period. Many of these stories were originally published in local newspapers and reprinted in William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times. Although the popularity of this type of humor died out with the beginning of the Civil War, its influences can be seen in the works of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Wolfe. The bibliography lists works about Southwest humor in general and by and about nine major humorists including David Crockett, Joseph Glover Baldwin, George Washington Harris, Johnson Jones Hooper, Henry Clay Lewis, Augustus Baldwin Longstreeet, Charles Fenton Mercer Noland, William Tappan Thompson, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe. These two main sections are supplemented by author and general subject indices. As the first book-length bibliography in this field, Humor of the Old Southwest will make a useful tool in academic libraries and will find a place in collections of folklore, American literature, and humor.

The Sot-Weed Factor

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Author :
Publisher : Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1628972009
Total Pages : 737 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (289 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sot-Weed Factor by : John Barth

Download or read book The Sot-Weed Factor written by John Barth and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece. This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting...to roam the world since Candide." "A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK, yes, long-winded) this satire of the 18th-century picaresque novel-think Fielding's Tom Jones or Sterne's Tristram Shandy -is also an earnest picture of the pitfalls awaiting innocence as it makes its unsteady way in the world. It's the late 17th century and Ebenezer Cooke is a poet, dutiful son and determined virgin who travels from England to Maryland to take possession of his father's tobacco (or "sot weed") plantation. He is also eventually given to believe that he has been commissioned by the third Lord Baltimore to write an epic poem, The Marylandiad. But things are not always what they seem. Actually, things are almost never what they seem. Not since Candide has a steadfast soul witnessed so many strange scenes or faced so many perils. Pirates, Indians, shrewd prostitutes, armed insurrectionists - Cooke endures them all, plus assaults on his virginity from both women and men. Barth's language is impossibly rich, a wickedly funny take on old English rhetoric and American self-appraisals. For good measure he throws in stories within stories, including the funniest retelling of the Pocahontas tale -revealed to us in the "secret" journals of Capt. John Smith - that anyone has ever dared to tell." —Time Magazine

Southern Frontier Humor

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Author :
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1617037680
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Southern Frontier Humor by : Edward J. Piacentino

Download or read book Southern Frontier Humor written by Edward J. Piacentino and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-04-20 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its inception in the early 1830s, southern frontier humor (also known as the humor of the Old Southwest) has had enduring appeal. The onset of the new millennium precipitated an impressive rejuvenation of scholarly interest. Beyond Southern Frontier Humor: Prospects and Possibilities represents the next step in this revival, providing a series of essays with fresh perspectives and contexts. First the book shows the importance of Henry Junius Nott, a writer virtually unknown and forgotten who mined many of the principal subjects, themes, tropes, and character types associated with southern frontier humor, followed by an essay addressing how this humor genre and its ideological impact helped to stimulate a national cultural revolution. Several essays focus on the genre's legacy to the post-Civil War era, exploring intersections between southern frontier humor and southern local color writers--Joel Chandler Harris, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Sherwood Bonner. Mark Twain's African American dialect piece "A True Story," though employing some of the conventions of southern frontier humor, is reexamined as a transitional text, showing his shift to broader concerns, particularly in race portraiture. Essays also examine the evolution of the trickster from the Jack Tales to Hooper's Simon Suggs to similar mountebanks in novels of John Kennedy Toole, Mark Childress, and Clyde Edgerton and transnational contexts, the latter exploring parallels between southern frontier humor and the Jamaican Anansi tales. Finally, the genre is situated contextually, using contemporary critical discourses, which are applied to G. W. Harris's Sut Lovingood and to various frontier hunting stories.

With the Bark on

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis With the Bark on by : John Q. Anderson

Download or read book With the Bark on written by John Q. Anderson and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventy selections of regional humor, many in dialect, taken from magazines and newspapers of the 1835-1860 period.

Civil War Humor

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Author :
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1604737484
Total Pages : 181 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (47 download)

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Book Synopsis Civil War Humor by : Cameron C. Nickels

Download or read book Civil War Humor written by Cameron C. Nickels and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Civil War Humor, author Cameron C. Nickels examines the various forms of comedic popular artifacts produced in America from 1861 to 1865, and looks at how wartime humor was created, disseminated, and received by both sides of the conflict. Song lyrics, newspaper columns, sheet music covers, illustrations, political cartoons, fiction, light verse, paper dolls, printed envelopes, and penny dreadfuls--from and for the Union and the Confederacy--are analyzed at length. Nickels argues that the war coincided with the rise of inexpensive mass printing in the United States and thus subsequently with the rise of the country's widely distributed popular culture. As such, the war was as much a "paper war"--involving the use of publications to disseminate propaganda and ideas about the Union and the Confederacy's positions--as one taking place on battlefields. Humor was a key element on both sides in deflating pretensions and establishing political stances (and ways of critiquing them). Civil War Humor explores how the combatants portrayed Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, life on the home front, battles, and African Americans. Civil War Humor reproduces over sixty illustrations and texts created during the war and provides close readings of these materials. At the same time, it places this corpus of comedy in the context of wartime history, economies, and tactics. This comprehensive overview examines humor's role in shaping and reflecting the cultural imagination of the nation during its most tumultuous period.

South to a Very Old Place

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307828611
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis South to a Very Old Place by : Albert Murray

Download or read book South to a Very Old Place written by Albert Murray and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-09-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The highly acclaimed novelist and biographer Albert Murray tells his classic memoir of growing up in Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s in South to a Very Old Place. Intermingling remembrances of youth with engaging conversation, African-American folklore, and astute cultural criticism, it is at once an intimate personal journey and an incisive social history, informed by "the poet's language, the novelist's sensibility, the essayist's clarity, the jazzman's imagination, the gospel singer's depth of feeling" (The New Yorker). "His perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor and its tenacious hold on the intellect...[It] destroys some fashionable socio-political interpretations of growing up black."--Toni Morrison, The New York Times Book Review