We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Transported Traditions: Transatlantic Foundations of Southern Folk Culture.
- Authors
Burrison, John A.
- Abstract
Presents literary criticism which explores the old-world sources for folk culture in the southern states of the U.S. No region of the U.S. has a more stereo-typed identity than the South. Hoop-skirted belles vie with barefoot hillbillies and cotton-picking sharecroppers in popular mythology. These distortions do, however, reflect an important reality, the role of the land both as terrain and as the basis for an agrarian way of life, in shaping the culture. Although the civil war and its aftermath certainly heightened the region's separateness from the rest of the U.S., a strictly historical approach based on membership in the Confederacy is not entirely satisfactory in establishing the region's limits, for Kentucky would be left out, as would border states such as Maryland and Missouri that are, in part, culturally southern. Central to the formation of a distinctly southern culture was the plantation system with its enslaved labor force. The region's character owes much to its large African American presence. Defined in this way, it can be argued that the South extends as far west as east Texas. Popularly regarded as the South's upper limit, the political boundary of the Mason-Dixon line, which runs along Pennsylvania-Maryland border, not coincidentally corresponds to a shift from northern to southern speech observed by linguistic geographers. The upland South, which barely participated in the plantation system, nevertheless shares certain features with the lowlands. The Cajun and Creole cultures of southern Louisiana, with their French roots, contrast with the more typical northern part of the state yet are still identifiable southern. The Indians of the South were settled agriculturalists whose villages and towns consisted of square houses with vertical framing posts and wattle-and-daub walls. Key gifts of U.S. natives to southern culture are maize and tobacco.
- Subjects
UNITED States; ESSAYS; FOLK culture; CULTURE; CIVIL war; PLANTATIONS; LANGUAGE &; languages; CAJUNS; CREOLES; INDIGENOUS peoples of the Americas; CORN; TOBACCO
- Publication
Studies in the Literary Imagination, 2003, Vol 36, Issue 2, p1
- ISSN
0039-3819
- Publication type
Literary Criticism