Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Introduction -- pt. 1. Mythmakers and revisionists: The myth of the ruined homeland. Southwest humor and the cordon sanitaire -- pt. 2. The world the humorists found: Migrating for fun and profit. Creation states and how they are used up. Fetching Arkansas. Southwest humor and the other. Scenes in course and field. River culture -- pt. 3. The world the humorists made: Authorship and amateurism. The languages of Southwest humor. Narrators and storytellers. Droll specimens and comfortable types. The yokel as social critic. Making game with Simon Suggs. The world according to Sut -- Afterword
"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of other discourses contemporaneous with it: travel books, local histories, memoirs, and sports manuals, as well as unpublished private forms such as personal correspondence, daybooks, and journals.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
