Southern comforts : drinking & the U.S. South / edited by Conor Picken & Matthew Dischinger.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Picken, Conor, editor.

Dischinger, Matthew, editor.

Series:

Southern literary studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--Southern States--History and criticism.

American literature.

Drinking customs.

Southern States.

Drinking of alcoholic beverages in literature.

Drinking customs in literature.

Alcoholism in literature.

Drinking customs--Southern States.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

ix, 292 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2020]

Summary:

"Moving beyond familiar myths about moonshiners, bootleggers, and hard-drinking writers, "Southern Comforts" explores how alcohol and drinking helped shape the literature and culture of the U.S. South. Edited by Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger, this collection of seventeen thought-provoking essays proposes that discussions about drinking in southern culture often orbit around familiar figures and mythologies that obscure what drinking has meant over time. Complexities of race, class, and gender remain hidden amid familiar images, catchy slogans, and convenient stories. As the first collection of scholarship that investigates the relationship between drinking and the South, "Southern Comforts" challenges popular assumptions about alcohol in the South by examining evocative topics drawn from literature, music, film, city life, and cocktail culture. Taken together, the essays collected here illustrate that exaggerated representations of drinking oversimplify the region's relationship to alcohol, in effect absorbing it into narratives of southern exceptionalism that persist to this day. From Edgar Allan Poe to Richard Wright, Bessie Smith to Johnny Cash, Bourbon Street tourism to post-Katrina disaster capitalism and more, "Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South" uncovers the reciprocal relationship between mythologies of drinking and mythologies of region"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: A Glass Half Full / Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger

Alcoholism, Temperance, and the South. Mama Likes Her Gin: Black Blueswomen, Freedom, and Alcohol in the Prohibition South / Alison Arant

The Spirits of Tradition: Calhoun Cocktails, Douglass Temperance, and Charles Chesnutt / John Stromski

The Last Black Temperance Activist: Frances Harper and the Black Public Sphere / Susan Zieger

"It's Either the Candy or the Hooch": Unlawful Appetites and Abject Bodies in Orson Welles's Border Noir Touch of Evil / Cara Koehler

The Tennessee Two-Step: Narrating Recovery in Country Music Autobiography / Matthew D. Sutton

Revising Narrative through Intoxication. Drink, Doubling, and Perverseness in Poe's Fiction / Caleb Doan and J. Gerald Kennedy

The Methodical Drinker: Alcohol, Economics, and Regional Identity in Early Virginian Literature / Katharine A. Burnett

The Inebriation and Adaptation of Larry Brown's Big Bad Love / Zackary Vernon

Flannery O'Connor, "Interleckchuls," and Cocktail Culture / Monica C. Miller

Trashed: Women Under the Influence of Alcohol in Wright's Native Son / Ellen Lansky

Miss Amelia's Liquor: "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" and Surregionalism / David A. Davis

Alcohol's Production, Commodification, and Circulation in the South. Racial Ambiguity, Bootlegging, and the Subversion of Plantation Hierarchies in Faulkner's South / Jenna Grace Sciuto

Moonshine in the Sunshine State: Alcohol's Roots and Routes in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's South Moon Under and Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not / Christopher Rieger

Granny Fees for Apple Pie: Gender and the Settler South in Moonshine Cinema / Jerod Ra' Del Hollyfield

The Bourbon Street Hustle: Midcentury Tourism in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces / Robert Rea

Jim Crow, Mardi Gras, and the Ojen Cocktail / Hannah C. Griggs

W's Good Time / Jennie Lightweis-Goff.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Southern comforts

ISBN:

9780807171738

0807171735

OCLC:

1122804020