This section contains 10,879 words (approx. 37 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: Oriard, Michael. “Shifty in a New Country: Games in Southwestern Humor.” Southern Literary Journal 12, no. 2 (spring 1980): 3-28.
In the following essay, Oriard explores the role of games in Southwestern humor literature.
Writing a half-century ago, Dorothy Dondore remarked on the similarities between the heroic age of Europe and the frontier period in America:
The existence of a dominantly masculine society, primitively simple in its standards; contempt for an alien and effete civilization; prime emphasis upon physical courage, brute strength, and mastery of the wild; featuring of the virtues of hospitality, generosity, loyalty to one's friends; arrogant rivalries settled by individual combats; a rude but effectual code of justice; a zest in horse-play, the labors of trencher and beaker, as gargantuan as zest in the thrill of the chase, whether it be wolf, bison, bear or fleeing foe—all of these and more parallel each other in the...
This section contains 10,879 words (approx. 37 pages at 300 words per page) |