Back to the Classics #8

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

American Humor: A Study of the National Character – Constance Rourke

Constance Rourke died in late March 1941, at only 56 years old, when she slipped and fell off the icy porch of her Grand Rapids, Michigan, house. With her untimely death, our country lost a pioneering scholar of American folk traditions, popular entertainment, and social history. She not only gathered information, often for the first time, but also analyzed it with a sharp yet sympathetic attitude.

She was among the scholars of the time who were concerned about the rise of fascism and communism between the wars so she wrote popularized history in order to remind the American people of who they are and the ideals they had better be ready to defend.

This ambitious book was published in 1931. It divides folkways of entertainment into a number of curious topics: the Yankee peddler and backwoodsman as American types; the minstrel show; trouping performers and strollers; and religious cultists as entertainers giving drudges respite. She shrewdly examines forgotten comic writers like Petroleum V. Nasby (Lincoln’s favorite funny man) and classic American writers such as Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, Emerson, Melville, Howells and Henry James. She persuasively juxtaposes Lincoln as a major literary figure and one whose storytelling prowess is in the American tradition of tall tales and joke-telling.

Rourke is apparently little read and little cited these days in American Studies, though her work was seminal for years after her decease. One problem for us post-moderns is that she doesn’t know anything about anthropology or ethnology. Although her recognition of Lincoln as a literary figure is discerning and prescient, sometimes the literary criticism feels labored, stretched. Hawthorne as a teller of folk tales seems weak. Ditto with Moby Dick an outgrowth of joke books of the day because of its risible Biblical names and puns. Still, for readers into the history of pop culture, this book might be worth reading.