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When we think of the Old South and its literature, we think of romance--of moonlight and magnolias and courtly cavaliers dueling and battling for fair and fiery maidens fluttering from the balconies of their mansions. In his introduction, editor Ben Forkner explains that most nineteenth-century southern novels fostered this romantic image in the form of great sweeping sagas with larger-than-life heroes and heroines. However, countering this tradition are the short gems of Georgia, which represent a frontier culture and a pioneering literature that was "vigorous and vivid and enduring at a time when the great mass of southern fiction, with few exceptions, had precious little to praise or to preserve." Whereas the majority of nineteenth-century novels have faded into oblivion, the Georgia short story has thrived. In the work of Joel Chandler Harris and Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, the lives of the middle and lower classes, black and white, are presented with realism, humor, and healthy self-mockery that have reverberated through both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, influencing the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Erskine Caldwell, Carson McCullers and Alice Walker. Wealth and poverty, humor and tragedy, the Old South and the New--although we may still not understand what makes up the Southern identity, surely in "Georgia Stories" we recognize its distinctive presence.… (más)
I bought this anthology because of the short short story by Harry Crews, but stayed to enjoy several others in the book. I especially loved Carson McCullers' "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe." Forkner righteously says he picked from stories set in Georgia, not necessarily from Georgia writers, per se. And what regional anthology doesn't do that? I'm sure there have been Spanish, Cuban, Idaho, Key West, Michigan and Illinois anthologies, all claiming Ernest Hemingway as their own. It's the nature of the beast.
What was good about this collection is that Forkner chose writers that wrote, for the most part, in the Georgia vernacular. This is not an easy thing to do! One must be intimately familiar with the vowels, consonants, umblots, and other accents to write this way. Some have tried to their chagrin. ( )
When we think of the Old South and its literature, we think of romance--of moonlight and magnolias and courtly cavaliers dueling and battling for fair and fiery maidens fluttering from the balconies of their mansions. In his introduction, editor Ben Forkner explains that most nineteenth-century southern novels fostered this romantic image in the form of great sweeping sagas with larger-than-life heroes and heroines. However, countering this tradition are the short gems of Georgia, which represent a frontier culture and a pioneering literature that was "vigorous and vivid and enduring at a time when the great mass of southern fiction, with few exceptions, had precious little to praise or to preserve." Whereas the majority of nineteenth-century novels have faded into oblivion, the Georgia short story has thrived. In the work of Joel Chandler Harris and Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, the lives of the middle and lower classes, black and white, are presented with realism, humor, and healthy self-mockery that have reverberated through both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, influencing the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Erskine Caldwell, Carson McCullers and Alice Walker. Wealth and poverty, humor and tragedy, the Old South and the New--although we may still not understand what makes up the Southern identity, surely in "Georgia Stories" we recognize its distinctive presence.
What was good about this collection is that Forkner chose writers that wrote, for the most part, in the Georgia vernacular. This is not an easy thing to do! One must be intimately familiar with the vowels, consonants, umblots, and other accents to write this way. Some have tried to their chagrin. ( )