The Old Southwest flourished between 1830 and 1860, but its brand of humor lives on in the writings of Mark Twain, the novels of William Faulkner, the television series The Beverly Hillbillies, the material of comedian Jeff Foxworthy, and even cyberspace, where nonsoutherners can come up to speed on subjects like hickphonics. The first book on its subject, The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor engages topics ranging from folklore to feminism to the Internet as it pays tribute to a distinctly American comic style that has continued to reinvent itself. The book begins by examining frontier southern humor as manifested in works of Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Woody Guthrie, Harry Crews, William Price Fox, Fred Chappell, Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, and African American writers Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, and Yusef Komunyakaa. It then explores southwestern humor’s legacy in popular culture—including comic strips, comedians, and sitcoms—and on the Internet. Many of the trademark themes of modern and contemporary southern wit appeared in stories that circulated in the antebellum Southwest. Often taking the form of tall tales, those stories have served and continue to serve as rich, reusable material for southern writers and entertainers in the twentieth century and beyond. The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor is an innovative collaboration that delves into jokes about hunting, drinking, boasting, and gambling as it studies, among other things, the styles of comedians Andy Griffith, Dave Gardner, and Justin Wilson. It gives splendid demonstration that through the centuries southern humor has continued to be a powerful tool for disarming hypocrites and opening up sensitive issues for discussion.

Though the phrase "Calvinist humor" may seem to be an oxymoron, Michael Dunne, in highly original and unfailingly interesting readings of major American fiction writers, uncovers and traces two recurrent strands of Calvinist humor descending from Puritan times far into the twentieth century. Calvinist doctrine views mankind as fallen, apt to engage in any number of imperfect behaviors. Calvinist humor, Dunne explains, consists in the perception of this imperfection. When we perceive that only others are imperfect, we participate in the form of Calvinist humor preferred by William Bradford and Nathanael West. When we perceive that others are imperfect, as we all are, we participate in the form preferred by Mark Twain and William Faulkner, for example. Either by noting their characters' inferiority or by observing ways in which we are all far from perfect, Dunne observes, American writers have found much to laugh about and many occasions for Calvinist humor. The two strains of Calvinist humor are alike in making the faults of others more important than their virtues. They differ in terms of what we might think of as the writer/perceiver's disposition: his or her willingness to recognize the same faults in him- or herself. In addition to Bradford, West, Twain and Faulkner, Dunne discovers Calvinist humor in the works of Flannery O'Connor, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, and many others. For these authors, the world -- and thus their fiction -- is populated with flawed creatures. Even after belief in orthodox Calvinism diminished in the twentieth century, Dunne discovers, American writers continued to mine these veins, irrespective of the authors' religious affiliations -- or lack of them. Dunne notes that even when these writers fail to accept the Calvinist view wholeheartedly, they still have a tendency to see some version of Calvinism as more attractive than an optimistic, idealistic view of life. With an eye for the telling detail and a wry humor of his own, Dunne clearly demonstrates that the fundamental Calvinist assumption -- that human beings are fallen from some putatively better state -- has had a surprising, lingering presence in American literature.

Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction offers a pragmatic and theoretically informed model for analyzing how humor and gender intersect in key U.S. texts, bringing much-needed attention to the complex ways that humor can support and/or subvert reductive masculine codes and behaviors. Its argument builds upon three major humor theories – the incongruity theory, superiority theory, and relief theory – to analyze how humor is used to negotiate the shifting constructions of masculinity and manhood in American culture and literature. Focusing on explicit textual references to joking, pranks, and laughter, Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction offers well-supported, original interpretations of works by Mark Twain, Owen Wister, Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Sherman Alexie. The primary goal of Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction is to understand the multiple ways that humor performs and interrogates masculinity in seminal U.S. texts.

An insightful guidebook to some of the best examples of modern Southern fiction, as selected by an international group of critics In Still in Print, eighteen southern novels published since 1997 fall under the careful scrutiny of an international cast of accomplished literary critics to identify the very best of recent writings in the genre. These essays highlight the praiseworthy efforts of a pantheon of novelists celebrating and challenging regionality, unearthing manifestations of the past in the present, and looking to the future with wit and healthy skepticism. Organized around shared themes of history, place, humor, and malaise, the novels discussed here interrogate southern culture and explore the region's promise for the future. Four novels reconsider the Civil War and its aftermath as Charles Frazier, Kaye Gibbons, Josephine Humphreys, and Pam Durban revisit the past and add fresh insights to contemporary discussions of race and gender through their excursions into history. The novels by Steve Yarbrough, Larry Brown, Chris Offutt, Barry Hannah, and James Lee Burke demonstrate a keen sense of place, rooted in a South marked by fundamentalism, poverty, violence, and rampant prejudice but still capable of promise for some unseen future. The comic fiction of George Singleton, Clyde Edgerton, James Wilcox, Donald Harington, and Lewis Nordan shows how southern humor still encompasses customs and speech reflected in concrete places. Ron Rash, Richard Ford, and Cormac McCarthy probe the depths of human existence, often with disturbing results, as they write about protagonists cut off from their own humanity and desperate to reconnect with the human race. Diverse in content but unified in genre, these particular novels have been nominated by the contributors to Still in Print for long-term survival as among the best modern representations of the southern novel. Featuring: M. Thomas Inge on Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain Clara Juncker on Josephine Humphreys's Nowhere Else on Earth Kathryn McKee on Kaye Gibbons's On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon Jan Nordby Gretlund on Pam Durban's So Far Back Tara Powell on Percival Everett's Erasure Tom Dasher on Steve Yarbrough's The Oxygen Man Jean Cash on Larry Brown's Fay Carl Wieck on Chris Offutt's The Good Brother Owen W. Gilman Jr. on Barry Hannah's Yonder Stands Your Orphan Hans H. Skei on James Lee Burke's Crusader's Cross Charles Israel on George Singleton's Work Shirts for Madmen John Grammer on Clyde Edgerton's The Bible Salesman Scott Romine on James Wilcox's Heavenly Days Edwin T. Arnold on Donald Harington's Enduring Marcel Arbeit on Lewis Nordan's Lightning Song Thomas Ærvold Bjerre on Ron Rash's One Foot in Eden Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. on Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land Richard Gray on Cormac McCarthy's The Road

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching Southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South--global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South--that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of Southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum Southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth-century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of Southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical Southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.

The humor of the Old South—tales, almanac entries, turf reports, historical sketches, gentlemen's essays on outdoor sports, profiles of local characters—flourished between 1830 and 1860. The genre's popularity and influence can be traced in the works of major southern writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Harry Crews, as well as in contemporary popular culture focusing on the rural South. This collection of essays includes some of the past twenty five years' best writing on the subject, as well as ten new works bringing fresh insights and original approaches to the subject. A number of the essays focus on well known humorists such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, William Tappan Thompson, and George Washington Harris, all of whom have long been recognized as key figures in Southwestern humor. Other chapters examine the origins of this early humor, in particular selected poems of William Henry Timrod and Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which anticipate the subject matter, character types, structural elements, and motifs that would become part of the Southwestern tradition. Renditions of "Sleepy Hollow" were later echoed in sketches by William Tappan Thompson, Joseph Beckman Cobb, Orlando Benedict Mayer, Francis James Robinson, and William Gilmore Simms. Several essays also explore antebellum southern humor in the context of race and gender. This literary legacy left an indelible mark on the works of later writers such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner, whose works in a comic vein reflect affinities and connections to the rich lode of materials initially popularized by the Southwestern humorists.

The Encyclopedia of Humor: A Social History explores the concept of humor in history and modern society in the United States and internationally. This work’s scope encompasses the humor of children, adults, and even nonhuman primates throughout the ages, from crude jokes and simple slapstick to sophisticated word play and ironic parody and satire. As an academic social history, it includes the perspectives of a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, child development, social psychology, life style history, communication, and entertainment media. Readers will develop an understanding of the importance of humor as it has developed globally throughout history and appreciate its effects on child and adult development, especially in the areas of health, creativity, social development, and imagination. This two-volume set is available in both print and electronic formats. Features & Benefits: The General Editor also serves as Editor-in-Chief of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research for The International Society for Humor Studies. The book’s 335 articles are organized in A-to-Z fashion in two volumes (approximately 1,000 pages). This work is enhanced by an introduction by the General Editor, a Foreword, a list of the articles and contributors, and a Reader’s Guide that groups related entries thematically. A Chronology of Humor, a Resource Guide, and a detailed Index are included. Each entry concludes with References/Further Readings and cross references to related entries. The Index, Reader’s Guide themes, and cross references between and among related entries combine to provide robust search-and-browse features in the electronic version. This two-volume, A-to-Z set provides a general, non-technical resource for students and researchers in such diverse fields as communication and media studies, sociology and anthropology, social and cognitive psychology, history, literature and linguistics, and popular culture and folklore.