Joel Chandler Harris lived with debilitating shyness, repeatedly expressed regret at having his name in print, and insisted that he was a mere “cornfield journalist,” not a literary leader. However, in 1881, New York Times called Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings “the first real book of American folklore,” and by 1900, Harris was publishing his opinions on the principles of capitalism in the Saturday Evening Post.[1] In my final project, I intend to explore the connection between Harris’s early regional writing, and his later political commentary. What publication processes and professional connections led the shy regionalist to a position from which he could provide political analysis to a national audience?
Digitally visualizing Harris’s publications and correspondence will, I predict, reveal connections between the growth of a national audiences for his regional tales, his social and literary networks, and his eventual position as a political commentator. These patterns have the potential to help us more deeply understand how regional writers were endowed with a sense of authorial authenticity that contributed a sense of credibility to their nonfiction essays. As Richard Brodhead writes in Cultures of Letters, “regionalism made the experience of the socially marginalized into a literary asset.”[2] Harris, like all regional writers, performs marginality in his texts, and this performance of marginality could be used as cultural currency in nonfiction publication—a genre that did not typically value marginality.
I will explore Harris’s cultural transition by mapping his letters and publications using Neatline, a digital exhibit-builder that provides a way for scholars to connect maps with timelines and narratives. With this tool I will not simply create a static map, but I will also sync the map with a timeline of Harris’s biography and publication history, thereby visualizing the large-scale geographic and social networks that shaped Harris’s career. I hope to color code his publications by genre, so that the map will provide a clear visual of Harris’s shift from fiction to nonfiction writing. In order to use Neatline, I will need space on a server. Fortunately, I have been given access to the Digital Scholarship Lab’s server, and a programmer in the library is assisting me with the initial technical set up.
To return to the analog world, I will use information about Harris’s publication history, correspondence, and biography provided by books such as: The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris by Julia Collier Harris; The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris by Robert Lemuel Wiggins; Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography by Paul Cousins; Joel Chandler Harris by R. Bruce Bickley; and, perhaps most importantly, A Checklist of the Periodical Contributions of Joel Chandler Harris by William Bradley Strickland.
When I’m finished with my final project, I hope to have a digital map that will reveal connections between regional fiction, literary and social networks, and political influence; an understanding of these connections will allow me to propose written arguments about the development of Harris’s career and its place within the national literary and political landscape.
[1] Robert Hemenway, introduction to Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, (New York: Penguin, 1986), 9-14.
[2] Richard H. Brodhead, Culture of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), 117.
Very good idea. Harris is very much an interesting fellow and his Uncle Remus stories are of great cultural import to the South. I would ask if your project intends to focus on Harris in popular culture – a few adaptations of his work, particularly Disney’s “Song of the South” are incredibly controversial for their questionable racial connotations. Would you focus on this in any significant way in your project?
I have written about adaptations of his work in the past, and I could imagine Neatline representing that history in a revealing way. However, that seems like it might distract from my question of how he transitioned from regional writer to national commentator. It might be fruitful to consider mapping his literary afterlife if I decide to build on the project.
I imagine that considering some of the criticisms Harris faced, not just by way of adaptations of his work, but direct commentaries (especially from Black writers/scholars) about his work, would add context (rather than distract from) his rise to national renown from a regional writer. Since, his prominence partly came out of a location of his whiteness (that enabled him to tell the stories of slaves who were prohibited from doing so on their own). An analysis of political influence of his life without interrogating his whiteness (and the subsequent analyses that point back to that) would be sanitizing..
This seems fruitful. My biggest question is whether this will be used just for your own research or do you plan to make it a public tool? If it does at some point have a public facing iteration, who’s the audience, what’s the platform, what sorts of supporting texts and media will go with it, and how does the design and functionality evolve based on those things?
Great questions! If the project is successful, I’d love to make it a public tool. I think it would be cool to link pdfs and/or text files of his articles to corresponding points on the map. Most of the articles and stories are easily accessible online through Library of Congress and Project Gutenberg. Also, I have done some work comparing Harris and Du Bois–both were journalists in Atlanta writing about race, and although they never met, they talked about each other some. I have imagined adding Du Bois’s publications to the map. It might be interesting to see overlaps and differences in their publication networks.
This sounds like a very interesting project! Do you plan to cover the entire scope of Harris’ life in your project, or are you focusing on specific dates? Also, are you including both edited contributions alongside his publications? I am thinking specifically of his time spent as editor, and how that may have encouraged his journey into a more political realm.
I would like to cover his whole life. He only started publishing in the Saturday Evening Post in 1900, and he died in 1908, so if I want to see how his early writings lead to national attention, that’s pretty much his whole life. And, yes, I do want to include edited contributions. One thing I think might be interesting to visualize is he transition from just writing editorials for the Atlanta Constitution to writing editorials for national magazines. One thing I need to figure out, though, is how to visually represent his local publications vs. his national publications. His local publications would look more like a point on a map (he’s in Atlanta and he published an article in Atlanta), but I wonder if his national publications should also be represented as points (a point in New York, for example) or as connections (a line from Atlanta to New York). That’s sort of a small detail, but it effects the implications of the map. Do I want to emphasize publication in New York as an Atlanta/New York connection between author and publisher? Or do I want to show an isolated point that viewers could imagine connected to, say, thousands of readers across the nation? Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking through right now.