Minstrelsy and murder
Subtitle: the crisis of southern humor, 1835-1925
By: Andrew Silver.
Series: Southern literary studies
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Baton Rouge
Language: eng
Number of pages: 222
Subjects: American wit and humor -- Southern States -- History and criticism.; Humorous stories, American -- Southern States -- History and criticism.; American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Southern States -- Intellectual life.; Southern States -- In literature.
Description: "In Minstrelsy and Murder, Andrew Silver locates the foundation of the South's dark humor in the great and violent cultural upheavals of the nineteenth century. Examining the connection between comic victimization and real acts of aggression, Silver shows southern humor to be a product not of America's wholeness and national unity but of its internal fears, divisiveness, and perpetual civil strife. He focuses on the work of southern writers Augustus B. Longstreet, George Washington Harris, Charles Chesnutt, and Mark Twain, exploring a strain of regional humor that runs counter to the more familiar American comic tradition."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Faithless signs and pandaemonian riots : the amphibious politics of Longstreet's dialect humor; title: Making minstrelsy of murder : George Washington Harris, the Ku Klux Klan, and the reconstruction aesthetic of fright; title: Was Jim white? : navigating racial discourse in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; title: Making murder of minstrelsy : Charles Chesnutt's Ha'nts.