
Southern Comforts
Drinking and the U.S. South
Louisiana State University Press
Published on 30. March 2020
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-0-8071-7173-8 (ISBN)
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.
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.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Baton Rouge
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 236 mm
Width: 164 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
600 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8071-7173-8 (9780807171738)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
03/2020
Penguin Random House South Africa
€19.49
Available for download
Persons
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.
Matthew Dischinger is a lecturer in English at Georgia State University.
Editor
Contributions
Series Editor