According to William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman, humor spawns laughter and "designate^ a peculiar disposition that led to a person's readily perceiving the ridiculous, the ludicrous, and the comical ...and effectively giving expression to this perspective" (257); comedy, on the other hand, has as its purpose to amuse, "to provoke smiles and laughter" (106). ...comedy "deals with people in their human state, restrained and often made ridiculous by their limitations, faults, bodily functions, and animal nature" and often emanates from perceiving "some incongruity of speech, action, or character," one of the principal sources of which is recognizing the "discrepancy between fact and pretense" (Harmon and Holman 106). Characterizing Hawthorne's comic device of laughter as "anarchic," Brian Way writes: "The laughter in his work, far from being genial and benign, is a force that seems to sap the very foundations of things" (20). ...Way sees Hawthorne's brand of laughter as a "source of power . . . , releasing immense disruptive energies in the world of men, and analogous dramatic energies in the world of art" (25). According to reader response critic Wolfgang Iser, the "implied reader" is actually a "hypothetical" fabrication, extrapolated from the reader's role laid down in the text one that embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect-predispositions laid down, not by empirical outside reality, but by the text itself. ...Robin's laughter seems deceitful and expediently performative, a reaction of self-preservation in the face of unruly anarchists that represent a real and immediate threat to his personal security should he respond negatively to their actions and sympathetically to his kinsman's public ignominy.
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.
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 Possibilitiesrepresents 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.
This article is a recovery project that focuses on little-known humorous English sporting articles initially published in the 1830s and early 1840s in popular British periodicals and books and then ...reprinted in William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times, a New York newspaper, during the first decade of its existence. Porter sought to appeal to “gentlemen of standing, wealth and intelligence” who were also sportsmen or sports enthusiasts. Walter Blair's brief mention of English comic sporting writing in his 1953 essay “Traditions in Southern Humor” was my impetus to further explore this subject. This article examines subject matter, character types, narrative strategies, and stylistics of representative English comic sporting articles and pairs them with similar texts of Old Southwest humor, the former perhaps helping to pave the way for the genesis of a new quintessential humor genre.
This essay examines Victor Séjour's "The Mulatto" (1837), a short story acknowledged as the first fictional work by an African American. Through its representation of physical and psychological ...effects, Séjour's story, a narrative of slavery in Saint-Domingue, also inaugurated the literary delineation of slavery's submission-rebellion binary. The enslaved raconteur in "The Mulatto" voices protest and appeals to social consciousness and sympathy, anticipating the embedded narrators in works of later writers throughout the Plantation Americas.
2014 MARKED THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 1964 CIVIL RIGHTS ACT that outlawed racial segregation in schools, in workplaces, and at facilities serving as public accommodations. The law also helped ...to reduce racial and gender discrimination in hiring and unequal requirements for voter registration, breaking down some of the last barriers promoting oppression, divisiveness, and resistance to an integrated American society. It helped to acknowledge the "common humanity that is in us all" (Gaines 192), that is, in persons of different races, ethnicities, and genders. Even so, as Brian Norman has recently argued, "Jim Crow may no longer be the law of the land but, racial segregation persists in different, seemingly more complex forms. " Or as he succinctly puts it in what seems to be a paradox, "Segregation is a thing of the past; still segregation persists. "
'How wonderful it is to see that vast body of water tumble down there!' Then in an instant a bright thought flashed into my head, and I let it fly, saying, 'It would be a deal more wonderful to see ...it tumble up there!' (Mark Twain, "The Earliest Authentic Mention of Niagara Falls: Extracts from Adam's Diary, 1893) For centuries, Niagara Falls, which borders upper New York state and Canada, has fascinated people from all walks of life, especially travelers and visitors who have recorded their impressions of the Falls, one of the great natural wonders of the world. Recording his first impressions (his initial visit to the Falls was in 1860 at the age of 23), mainly in alluring terms, Howells notes the "sense of beauty, of serenity, of repose" and the sense of illusion when one looks "steadily at any part of the cataract, the descending floods seem ing to hang in arrest above the gulfs" (9, 4, 10). ...he accentuates his impression, describing in sublime terms "those liquid steeps, those precipices of molten emerald, all broken and fissured with opal and crystal, seemed like heights of sure and firmest earth, and the mists that climbed them half-way were as still to the eye in their subtler sort" (Howells 10) and elegantly observing that "all nature was rich and beautifully alive amid scenes which I think are the noblest.
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