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.Review Quotes: Can I buy you a drink? Calhoun or Ojen cocktail? Julip or Gin? Sour Mash or Moonshine? If you're dry, we can look into temperance and prohibition or explore fiction and movies, tough women and good old boys, blues and country. Pick your poison or pleasure - or both. With its innovative regional approach to American drinking, in an array of essays on the imaginary and material South, this book adds a top-shelf label to alcohol and addiction studies.--John W. Crowley, author of The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction