Abstract
This chapter takes as its focus an author from a rather different social position than the majority of Southern writers earlier in the century. Joel Chandler Harris is of more humble stock, and the politics of his work can reflect these beginnings. Templeton’s analysis engages with the ongoing debates about Harris and his status as a romancer of the Old South, and his relationship with the New South, and seeks to explore the manifestations of these tensions in the realist short fiction of his collections, Free Joe, and other Georgian Sketches and Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White.
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Notes
- 1.
Paul Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris: a biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 4.
- 2.
Merrill Maguire Skaggs, The Plain Folk of Southern Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972), 21.
- 3.
Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 135.
- 4.
Merrill Maguire Skaggs, The Plain Folk, 27.
- 5.
Scott Romine, The Narrative Forms of Southern Community (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 30.
- 6.
George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper, 1972), 204–216.
- 7.
R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography and Critical Study (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 68–70.
- 8.
Robert Bone, ‘The Oral Tradition’, in R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981), 131.
- 9.
Robert Hemenway, ‘Introduction’, in Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (New York: Penguin, 1982), 9.
- 10.
Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 100.
- 11.
Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 61.
- 12.
Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 94.
- 13.
Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 93.
- 14.
Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 19–20.
- 15.
Bickley, Joel Chandler Harris, 30.
- 16.
Bryan A. Giemza, ‘Joel Chandler Harris, Catholic’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 14, No. 3 (2011): 86.
- 17.
Jay Martin, ‘Joel Chandler Harris and the Cornfield Journalist’, in R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981), 92.
- 18.
Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 207.
- 19.
Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 211.
- 20.
Wayne Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865–1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 73.
- 21.
Terry Gifford, Pastoral (New York: Routledge, 1999), 12.
- 22.
Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 90.
- 23.
Arlin Turner, ‘Joel Chandler Harris in the Currents of Change’, in R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981), 111.
- 24.
Anonymous Review, quoted in R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981), 13.
- 25.
Bickley, Joel Chandler Harris, 48.
- 26.
Quoted in Ellen Johnson, ‘Geographic context and ethnic context: Joel Chandler Harris and Alice Walker’, Mississippi Quarterly 60, No. 2 (2007): 239.
- 27.
Hemenway, ‘Introduction’, 20.
- 28.
Williams, The Country and the City, 46–47.
- 29.
Bickley, Joel Chandler Harris, 109.
- 30.
Skaggs, The Plain Folk, 60.
- 31.
Skaggs, The Plain Folk, 144.
- 32.
Joel Chandler Harris, Free Joe, and Other Georgian Sketches (New York: International Association of Newspapers and Authors, 1901), 101. All subsequent references to this volume will be given in parentheses.
- 33.
Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 131.
- 34.
Skaggs, The Plain Folk, 212.
- 35.
See C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 1.
- 36.
Gifford, Pastoral, 17.
- 37.
Skaggs, The Plain Folk, 214.
- 38.
Romine, The Narrative Forms of Southern Community, 25.
- 39.
Walter M. Brasch, Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the “Cornfield Journalist”: The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000), 93–94.
- 40.
Skaggs, The Plain Folk, 92.
- 41.
Joel Chandler Harris, Mingo, and Other Sketches in Black and White (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1912), 239. All subsequent references to this text will be given in parentheses.
- 42.
Skaggs, The Plain Folk, 121.
- 43.
Skaggs, The Plain Folk, 143.
- 44.
Skaggs, The Plain Folk, 52.
- 45.
Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 169.
- 46.
Bickley, Joel Chandler Harris, 120.
- 47.
Bickley, Joel Chandler Harris, 35.
- 48.
Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 147.
- 49.
Bickley, Joel Chandler Harris, 117.
- 50.
Anonymous Review, quoted in R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981), 15.
- 51.
Skaggs, The Plain Folk, 64.
- 52.
Gifford, Pastoral, 81.
- 53.
Skaggs, The Plain Folk, 43.
- 54.
Mixon, Southern Writers, 79.
- 55.
Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 148.
- 56.
Bickley, Joel Chandler Harris, 121.
- 57.
Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 38.
- 58.
Robert Cochran, ‘Black Father: The Subversive Achievement of Joel Chandler Harris’, African American Review 38, No. 1 (2004): 23.
- 59.
Bickley, Joel Chandler Harris, 102.
- 60.
Jennifer Bloomquist, ‘The Minstrel Legacy: African American English and the Historical Construction of “Black” Identities in Entertainment’, Journal of African American Studies 19, No. 4, (2015): 417. See also Joseph McLaren, ‘African Diaspora Vernacular Traditions and the Dilemma of Identity’, Research in African Literatures 40, No. 1 (2009): 107.
- 61.
David G. Cox, ‘“Half Bacchanalian, Half Devout”: White Intellectuals, Black Folk Culture, and the “Negro Problem”’, American Nineteenth-Century History 16, No.3 (2015): 242.
- 62.
Darwin T. Turner, ‘Daddy Joel Harris and his Old-Time Darkies’, in R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981), 119.
- 63.
Bickley, Joel Chandler Harris, 94.
- 64.
Petersen, The Jefferson Image, 335.
- 65.
Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris, 214. See also Bickley, Joel Chandler Harris, 58.
- 66.
Joel Chandler Harris, Gabriel Tolliver: A Story of Reconstruction (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1902), 18.
- 67.
See Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 330–347.
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Templeton, P. (2019). Joel Chandler Harris and the Pastoral of the New South. In: The Politics of Southern Pastoral Literature, 1785–1885. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04888-4_7
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