Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South (Southern Literary Studies)

By: J. Gerald Kennedy and Monica Carol Miller and Susan Zieger and Scott Romine and Jerod Ra'Del Hollyfield and Katharine Burnett and Zackary Vernon and David A. Davis and Matthew Sutton and Alison Arant and John Stromski and Cara Koehler and Caleb Doan and Ellen Lansky and Jenna Sciuto and Christopher Rieger and Robert Rea and Hannah C. Griggs and Jennie Lightweis-Goff

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Synopsis: 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 alcohol consumption 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 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 South’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.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
Book Size:: 304 Pages
ISBN-13:: 9780807173312
Related ISBNs:: 9780807173305, 9780807171738
Publisher:: LSU Press
Date of Addition:: 05/24/23
Copyrighted By:: Louisiana State University Press
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: Nonfiction, Cooking, Food and Wine, Literature and Fiction, Social Studies, Language Arts
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.
Edited by:: Conor Picken
Edited by:: Matthew Dischinger