SOURCE: Covici, Pascal, Jr. “Propriety, Society, and Sut Lovingood: Vernacular Gentility in Action.” In Sut Lovingood's Nat'ral Born Yarnspinner: Essays on George Washington Harris, edited by James E. Caron and M. Thomas Inge, pp. 246-60. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Covici discusses George Washington Harris' Sut Lovingood tales as a violation of nineteenth-century societal norms of propriety and civility.

If propriety can be said to have its fictional antithesis, George Washington Harris's Sut Lovingood has the nomination, so far as his delightedly disgusted readers can tell. Edmund Wilson, the most prestigious critic to comment on poor old Sut and poor dead Harris, put the matter this way: “One of the most striking things about Sut Lovingood is that it is all as offensive as possible. It takes a pretty strong stomach nowadays—when so much of the disgusting in our fiction is not rural...