Browse

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. This 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. One chapter addresses how this humor genre and its ideological impact helped to stimulate a national cultural revolution. Several chapters 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. Chapters 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.

Transforming Girls: The Power of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence refocuses the history of the girls’ book and female adolescence through a comparative analysis of forgotten bestsellers aimed at adolescent girls in the United States and Germany. While these stories rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy, they also provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. Adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—is defined in these novels as a celebration of fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self. Through insightful readings of best-selling novels, Transforming Girls explores the origins of the young adult novel, mothering as a communal enterprise, the teaching of gender identity, the girls’ book as a model for narratives of nation building, and homesickness as an antidote to nostalgia. It provides access to a forgotten group of texts that reframe our understanding of the history of the girls’ book, young adult literature, and the possibilities of adolescence. The awkward adolescent girl—so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls—remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them.

Samuel L. Clemens lost the 1882 lawsuit declaring his exclusive right to use “Mark Twain” as a commercial trademark, but he succeeded in the marketplace, where synergy among his comic journalism, live performances, authorship, and entrepreneurship made “Mark Twain” the premier national and international brand of American humor in his day. So it remains in ours, because Mark Twain’s humor not only expressed views of self and society well ahead of its time, but also anticipated ways in which humor and culture coalesce in today’s postindustrial information economy—the global trade in media, performances, and other forms of intellectual property that began after the Civil War. This book traces four hallmarks of Twain’s humor that are especially significant today. Mark Twain’s invention of a stage persona comically conflated with his biographical self lives on in contemporary performances by Garrison Keillor, Margaret Cho, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jon Stewart. The postcolonial critique of Britain that underlies America’s nationalist tall tale tradition not only self-destructs in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court but also drives the critique of American Exceptionalism in Philip Roth’s literary satires. The semi-literate writing that gives Adventures of Huckleberry Finn its “vernacular vision”—wrapping cultural critique in ostensibly innocent transgressions and misunderstandings—has a counterpart in the apparently untutored drawing style and social critique seen in The Simpsons, Lynda Barry’s comics, and The Boondocks.