Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
tradition; the later colonists imitated English models and, more rarely,
French ones. Forms of satire are to be found in New England occasionally
in religious poetry and prose, but perhaps most clearly in a Thomas Morton
or a Nathaniel Ward in the seventeenth century and in newspaper writers
and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth. But the form, or the use of
it, seems never to have been as persistent or widespread as it was from
Maryland and Virginia to Georgia, from Captain Smith to the early pre­
Revolutionary pamphleteers and versifiers. Irony, parody, the mock-heroic,
travesty, the Hudibrastic, all but the first variations of the burlesque, are
to be found in every southern province possibly save North Carolina,
and at the very end of the period the controversial pamphlet-essay satire
is everywhere. As in Britain, satiric expression is more frequent in the
eighteenth than the seventeenth century, but the earlier period certainly
had strong examples.
Satire has many uses, including what has been called "putting down
the mighty." But as a moral and social weapon its function in the Chesapeake
area, the Carolinas, and Georgia was to point up, to sharpen the
evidence that there was a great difference between truth and appearance in
the New World. Some but not all of it belongs to the literature of disenchantment,
the opposite of or reaction from the promotional or American-Dream
writing already considered. And it was possible for a work
aimed primarily, at least ostensibly, at promotion to contain within it, or
to be made up in part of, elements of irony or the mock-heroic or other
forms of the genre.
Southern colonial satire might be personal or public, political or social,
addressed at or to an individual or special group or at the general public.
From first to last it usually recognized its classical origins and often directly
imitated a Latin work and more rarely a Greek one. In the eighteenth
century it seems fairly obvious that some satiric models were from
French and Italian literature, as in the book-length prose satire of James
Reid or some of the verses of Robert Bolling of Chellowe.
Closely allied to all this satire is the quality we call humor, for satire is
frequently employed to produce humor. Though there may be no such
thing as pure humor, or the purely comic, there is the relatively pleasant
tale, phrase, sentence, or tone designed merely to bring pleasure in the
form of a smile or a laugh. Almost from the beginning, partially because
of its New World subject mattr, the comic per se (or relatively so ) began
to show qualities which were to grow into what Walter Blair or Constance
Rourke might call American humor, or what they and others have labeled
backwoods or southwestern humor. Its roots are discernible in the days of
the Virginia Company, in certain sorts or degrees of irony, in tall tales of
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