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

Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South (Southern Literary Studies) By Conor Picken (Editor), Matthew Dischinger (Editor), Scott Romine (Editor) Cover Image
By Conor Picken (Editor), Matthew Dischinger (Editor), Scott Romine (Editor)
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Description


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.

About the Author


Conor Picken is assistant professor of English and the faculty director of the Compassio Learning Community at Bellarmine University. Matthew Dischinger is a lecturer in English at Georgia State University.


Product Details
ISBN: 9780807171738
ISBN-10: 0807171735
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: March 11th, 2020
Pages: 304
Language: English
Series: Southern Literary Studies