| Minstrel Shows and Whiteface Conventions argues that Southern humor represents an effort to negotiate middle class identity through the stylized language and gestures of lower class whites and African Americans. Rather than a direct recording of frontier truths or "folk" utterances, Southern humor represents a highly idiosyncratic appropriation, interpretation and translation of received and contemporary discourses, both humorous and non-humorous, including popular theater, sentiment, journalism, religious discourse, travel narratives, scientific and political treatises.;Engaging and extending traditional conversations about American humor in general and Southern humor in particular, my dissertation begins an inquiry into both the cultural anxieties that popular humor addresses and the popular forms of entertainment that determine its "authentic" voices. I analyze four authors and their revisions of contemporary popular culture: Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's rewriting of law circuit stories about poor whites in the Jacksonian era, George Washington Harris's indebtedness to comic narratives of Ku Klux Klan violence against African Americans in the Reconstruction South, Mark Twain's revision of both sentimental narratives and black-face minstrelsy in the Reconstruction North, and Erskine Caldwell's subversion of popular evangelicalism during the Great Depression. Southern humor, I argue, does not represent the flowering of an authentic folk tradition, or a revolt against authority, so much as it represents a middle class response to moments of social crisis in American history. |
