Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South
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.

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Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South
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.

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Overview

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807171738
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Publication date: 03/11/2020
Series: Southern Literary Studies
Pages: 304
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.12(d)

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Glass Half Full (Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger)

Section One: Alcoholism, Temperance, and the South
1. Alison Arant (Wagner College), Mama Likes Her Gin: Black Blues Women, Freedom, and Alcohol in the Prohibition South
2. John Stromski (Independent Scholar), The Spirits of Tradition: Calhoun Cocktails, Douglass Temperance, and Charles Chesnutt
3. Susan Zieger (University of California, Riverside), The Last Black Temperance Activist: Frances Harper and the Black Public Sphere
4. Cara Koehler (University of Bamberg, Germany), “It’s either the candy or the hooch”: Unlawful Appetites and Abject Bodies in Orson Welles’ Border Film Touch of Evil
5. Matthew Sutton (East Tennessee State University), The Tennessee Two-Step: Narrating Recovery in Country-Music Autobiography

Section Two: Revising Narrative through Intoxication

6. Caleb Doan (Louisiana State University) and J. Gerald Kennedy (Louisiana State University), Drink, Doubling, and Perverseness in Poe’s Fiction
7. Katharine A. Burnett (Fisk University), The Methodical Drinker: Alcohol, Economics, and Regional Identity in Early Virginian Literature
8. Zackary Vernon (Appalachian State University), The Inebriation and Adaptation of Larry Brown’s Big Bad Love
9. Monica C. Miller (Middle Georgia State University), Flannery O’Connor, “Interleckchuls,” and Cocktail Culture
10. Ellen Lansky (Inver Hills Community College), Trashed: Women Under the Influence of Alcohol in Wright’s Native Son
11. David A. Davis (Mercer University), Miss Amelia’s Liquor: “The Ballad of the Sad Café” and Surregionalism

Section Three: Alcohol’s Production, Commodification, and Circulation in the South

12. Jenna Sciuto (Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts), Racial Ambiguity, Bootlegging, and the Subversion of Plantation Hierarchies in Faulkner’s South
13. Christopher Rieger (Southeast Missouri State University), Moonshine in the Sunshine State: Alcohol’s Roots and Routes in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s South Moon Under and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not
14. Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield (Carson-Newman University), Granny Fees for Apple Pie: Gender and the Settler South in Moonshine Cinema
15. Robert Rea (University of Mississippi), The Bourbon Street Hustle: Midcentury Tourism in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces
16. Hannah C. Griggs (Emory University), Jim Crow, Mardi Gras, and the Ojen Cocktail
17. Jennie Lightweis-Goff (University of Mississippi), W’s Good Time

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