| Thomas Bangs Thorpe's reputation as one of the foremost antebellum humorists rests on "The Big Bear of Arkansas." Since 1930 when Franklin J. Meine included it in Tall Tales of the Southwest, it has become the most frequently anthologized of his pieces, and only a few of the others he wrote about the southwestern frontier are currently in print. Most of his sketches appeared originally in the early 1840s in newspapers, primarily in either his Concordia Intelligencer at Vidalia, Louisiana, or the New York Spirit of the Times. The contents of The Mysteries of the Backwoods (1846) and The Hive of "The Bee-Hunter" (1854) are mainly revised versions of previously published pieces.;This edition of forty-eight pieces which Thorpe wrote about the Old Southwest offers reliable texts for the twenty-five different sketches in his two collections and for the twelve humorous letters and ten other pieces, three of them previously unknown, which appeared only in newspapers. It also contains the only article, first published in The Knickerbocker Gallery (1855), for which a manuscript is known to exist. In the absence of manuscripts or printer's copies, the original printed texts serve as copytexts. In only two cases is the first appearance in an issue of a newspaper which is presumably not extant. This edition does not follow the final authorial version nor does it offer an eclectic text since the substantive variants indicate that Thorpe changed his intention for the sketches when he revised them for his books, hoping that they would be acceptable to an audience with more genteel tastes than those of the readers of sporting publications and Louisiana newspapers. The humorists of the Old Southwest are significant, in part, for their earthy realism and their vernacular point of view which subverted the standards of the day's polite literature. Thus conflating the different versions would obscure both his connections with the other humorists and part of his own achievement.;The apparatus includes textual notes which describe the publication history of each piece, a list of emendations, and a list of compound words at end of line. The list of significant post-copy-text substantive variants covers the twenty-three sketches which Thorpe reprinted, but it does not contain every substantive variant because many of them are inconsequential and may quite likely reflect styling. This list will be useful in analyzing how Thorpe revised his writings for a new audience and in assessing the accuracy and fullness of his presentation of the frontier.;The introductory chapters in this study examine Thorpe's sketches in terms of the traditions of travel writing and sporting and humorous literature. Like the travel writers, he offered reliable information about the frontier to those who had not been there, giving special attention to its wild animals and field sports. He was among the first to write in detail about American field sports, and his analysis of the character of the frontiersman on the basis of this material distinguishes his sketches from those of his contemporaries. Thorpe's humorous pieces also reflect his interest in the sports of the frontier. However, in them he pictured the dark side of nature which man cannot control, laughing along with the backwoodsmen at the obstacles, brutality, and danger surrounding them. Two other chapters precede the edited sketches. One is a detailed examination of Thorpe's bibliography and the publishing history of his sketches; the other is a textual commentary. |
