Southern Comforts
Drinking and the U.S. South

Conor Picken (Edited by), Matthew Dischinger (Edited by), Scott Romine (Series edited by), Alison Arant (Contributions by), John Stromski (Contributions by), Susan Zieger (Contributions by), Cara Koehler (Contributions by), Matthew Sutton (Contributions by), Caleb Doan (Contributions by), J. Gerald Kennedy (Contributions by), Katharine A. Burnett (Contributions by), Zackary Vernon (Contributions by), Monica Carol Miller (Contributions by), Ellen Lansky (Contributions by), David A. Davis (Contributions by), Jenna Sciuto (Contributions by), Christopher Rieger (Contributions by), Jerod Ra'Del Hollyfield (Contributions by), Robert Rea (Contributions by), Hannah C. Griggs (Contributions by), Jennie Lightweis-Goff (Contributions by)

9780807171738

Hardback, published 11 March 2020

304 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.9 cm, 0.6 kg

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.