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.
Industry Reviews
With this volume, Picken and Dischinger offer a compelling intervention in southern studies. Together, the assembled essays provide a necessary corrective to popular narratives that regard the U.S. South as either a homogenous landscape of dry counties or awash in the honorifics of a noble cocktail culture. Southern Comforts demonstrates the profound problems with both of those assumptions and allows readers to understand that where and why one imbibes is often as important as what one drinks.
