Collected Works of Joel Chandler Harris. Illustrated (eBook)

Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit, Little Mr. Thimblefinger, Mingo and other Sketches and others

Joel Chandler Harris (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
6572 Seiten
Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing (Verlag)
978-0-88001-326-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris wrote novels, narrative histories, translations of French folklore, children's literature, and collections of stories depicting rural life in Georgia. As fiction writer and folklorist, he wrote many 'Brer Rabbit' stories from the African-American oral tradition. He realized the literary value of the stories he had heard from the slaves of Turnwold Plantation. Harris set out to record the stories and insisted that they be verified by two independent sources before he would publish them. The stories, mostly collected directly from the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect, animal personages, and serialized landscapes. Contents:  1. The Uncle Remus Books - Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881) - Nights with Uncle Remus (1883) - Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892) - The Tar-Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904) - Told by Uncle Remus (1905) - Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (1907) - Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1910) - Uncle Remus Returns (1918) - Seven Tales of Uncle Remus (1948) 2. Mr. Thimblefinger Series - Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894) - Mr. Rabbit at Home (1895) - The Story of Aaron (So Named), the Son of Ben Ali (1896) - Aaron in the Wildwoods (1897) 3. The Novels - The Romance of Rockville (1878) - On the Plantation (1892) - Sister Jane (1896) - Gabriel Tolliver (1902) - A Little Union Scout (1904) - Shadow between His Shoulder Blades (1909) - The Bishop and the Boogerman (1909) 4. The Shorter Fiction - Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White (1884) - Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches (1887) - Daddy Jake, The Runaway: And Short Stories Told After Dark (1889) - Balaam and His Master and Other Sketches and Stories (1891) - Evening Tales (1893) - Stories of Georgia (1896) - Tales of the Home Folks in Peace and War (1898) - The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (1899) - Plantation Pageants (1899) - On the Wing of Occasions (1900) - The Making of a Statesman and Other Stories (1902) - Wally Wanderoon and His Story-Telling Machine (1903) 

Joel Chandler Harris (December 9, 1848 - July 3, 1908) was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years, Harris spent most of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at The Atlanta Constitution.

Textauszug

INTRODUCTION

I AM ADVISED by my publishers that this book is to be included in their catalogue of humorous publications, and this friendly warning gives me an opportunity to say that however humorous it may be in effect, its intention is perfectly serious; and, even if it were otherwise, it seems to me that a volume written wholly in dialect must have its solemn, not to say melancholy, features. With respect to the Folk-Lore scenes, my purpose has been to preserve the legends themselves in their original simplicity, and to wed them permanently to the quaint dialect — if, indeed, it can be called a dialect — through the medium of which they have become a part of the domestic history of every Southern family; and I have endeavored to give to the whole a genuine flavor of the old plantation.

Each legend has its variants, but in every instance I have retained that particular version which seemed to me to be the most characteristic, and have given it without embellishment and without exaggeration.

The dialect, it will be observed, is wholly different from that of the Hon. Pompey Smash and his literary descendants, and different also from the intolerable misrepresentations of the minstrel stage, but it is at least phonetically genuine. Nevertheless, if the language of Uncle Remus fails to give vivid hints of the really poetic imagination of the negro; if it fails to embody the quaint and homely humor which was his most prominent characteristic; if it does not suggest a certain picturesque sensitiveness — a curious exaltation of mind and temperament not to be defined by words — then I have reproduced the form of the dialect merely, and not the essence, and my attempt may be accounted a failure. At any rate, I trust I have been successful in presenting what must be, at least to a large portion of American readers, a new and by no means unattractive phase of negro character — a phase which may be considered a curiously sympathetic supplement to Mrs. Stowe’s wonderful defense of slavery as it existed in the South. Mrs. Stowe, let me hasten to say, attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius; but the same genius painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner, and defended him.

A number of the plantation legends originally appeared in the columns of a daily newspaper — The Atlanta Constitution and in that shape they attracted the attention of various gentlemen who were kind enough to suggest that they would prove to be valuable contributions to myth-literature. It is but fair to say that ethnological considerations formed no part of the undertaking which has resulted in the publication of this volume. Professor J. W. Powell, of the Smithsonian Institution, who is engaged in an investigation of the mythology of the North American Indians, informs me that some of Uncle Remus’s stories appear in a number of different languages, and in various modified forms, among the Indians; and he is of the opinion that they are borrowed by the negroes from the red-men. But this, to say the least, is extremely doubtful, since another investigator (Mr. Herbert H. Smith, author of Brazil and the Amazons) has met with some of these stories among tribes of South American Indians, and one in particular he has traced to India, and as far east as Siam. Mr. Smith has been kind enough to send me the proof-sheets of his chapter on The Myths and Folk-Lore of the Amazonian Indians, in which he reproduces some of the stories which he gathered while exploring the Amazons.

In the first of his series, a tortoise falls from a tree upon the head of a jaguar and kills him; in one of Uncle Remus’s stories, the terrapin falls from a shelf in Miss Meadows’s house and stuns the fox, so that the latter fails to catch the rabbit. In the next, a jaguar catches a tortoise by the hind-leg as he is disappearing in his hole; but the tortoise convinces him he is holding a root, and so escapes; Uncle Remus tells how the fox endeavored to drown the terrapin, but turned him loose because the terrapin declared his tail to be only a stump-root. Mr. Smith also gives the story of how the tortoise outran the deer, which is identical as to incident with Uncle Remus’s story of how Brer Tarrypin outran Brer Rabbit. Then there is the story of how the tortoise pretended that he was stronger than the tapir. He tells the latter he can drag him into the sea, but the tapir retorts that he will pull the tortoise into the forest and kill him besides. The tortoise thereupon gets a vine-stem, ties one end around the body of the tapir, and goes to the sea, where he ties the other end to the tail of a whale. He then goes into the wood, midway between them both, and gives the vine a shake as a signal for the pulling to begin. The struggle between the whale and tapir goes on until each thinks the tortoise is the strongest of animals. Compare this with the story of the terrapin’s contest with the bear, in which Miss Meadows’s bed-cord is used instead of a vine-stem. One of the most characteristic of Uncle Remus’s stories is that in which the rabbit proves to Miss Meadows and the girls that the fox is his riding-horse. This is almost identical with a story quoted by Mr. Smith, where the jaguar is about to marry the deer’s daughter. The cotia — a species of rodent — is also in love with her, and he tells the deer that he can make a riding-horse of the jaguar.

“Well,” says the deer, “if you can make the jaguar carry you, you shall have my daughter.” Thereupon the story proceeds pretty much as Uncle Remus tells it of the fox and rabbit. The cotia finally jumps from the jaguar and takes refuge in a hole, where an owl is set to watch him, but he flings sand in the owl’s eyes and escapes. In another story given by Mr. Smith, the cotia is very thirsty, and, seeing a man coming with a jar on his head, lies down in the road in front of him, and repeats this until the man puts down his jar to go back after all the dead cotias he has seen. This is almost identical with Uncle Remus’s story of how the rabbit robbed the fox of his game. In a story from Upper Egypt, a fox lies down in the road in front of a man who is carrying fowls to market, and finally succeeds in securing them.

This similarity extends to almost every story quoted by Mr. Smith, and some are so nearly identical as to point unmistakably to a common origin; but when and where? when did the negro or the North American Indian ever come in contact with the tribes of South America? Upon this point the author of Brazil and the Amazons, who is engaged in making a critical and comparative study of these myth-stories, writes:

“I am not prepared to form a theory about these stories. There can be no doubt that some of them, found among the negroes and the Indians, had a common origin. The most natural solution would be to suppose that they originated in Africa, and were carried to South America by the negro slaves. They are certainly found among the Red Negroes; but, unfortunately for the African theory, it is equally certain that they are told by savage Indians of the Amazons Valley, away up on the Tapajos, Red Negro, and Tapura. These Indians hardly ever see a negro, and their languages are very distinct from the broken Portuguese spoken by the slaves. The form of the stories, as recounted in the Tupi and Mundurucu’ languages, seems to show that they were originally formed in those languages or have long been adopted in them.

“It is interesting to find a story from Upper Egypt (that of the fox who pretended to be dead) identical with an Amazonian story, and strongly resembling one found by you among the negroes. Vambagen, the Brazilian historian (now Visconde de Rio Branco), tried to prove a relationship between the ancient Egyptians, or other Turanian stock, and the Tupi Indians. His theory rested on rather a slender basis, yet it must be confessed that he had one or two strong points. Do the resemblances between old and New World stories point to a similar conclusion? It would be hard to say with the material that we now have.

“One thing is certain. The animal stories told by the negroes in our Southern States and in Brazil were brought by them from Africa. Whether they originated there, or with the Arabs, or Egyptians, or with yet more ancient nations, must still be an open question. Whether the Indians got them from the negroes or from some earlier source is equally uncertain. We have seen enough to know that a very interesting line of investigation has been opened.”

Professor Hartt, in his Amazonian Tortoise Myths, quotes a story from the Riverside Magazine of November, 1868, which will be recognized as a variant of one given by Uncle Remus. I venture to append it here, with some necessary verbal and phonetic alterations, in order to give the reader an idea of the difference between the dialect of the cotton plantations, as used by Uncle Remus, and the lingo in vogue on the rice plantations and Sea Islands of the South Atlantic States:

“One time B’er Deer an’ B’er Cooter (Terrapin) was courtin’, and de lady did bin lub B’er Deer mo’ so dan B’er Cooter. She did bin lub B’er Cooter, but she lub B’er Deer de morest. So de young lady say to B’er Deer and B’er Cooter bofe dat dey mus’ hab a ten-mile race, an de one dat beats, she will go marry him.

“So B’er Cooter say to B’er Deer: ‘You has got mo longer legs dan I has, but I will run you. You run ten mile on land, and I will run ten mile on de water!’

“So B’er Cooter went an’ git nine er his fam’ly, an’ put one at ebery mile-pos’, and he hisse’f, what was to run wid B’er Deer, he was right in front of de young...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.11.2021
• Verlagsort: Mikhailovka village
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Vorlesebücher / Märchen
• Schlagworte: African-American traditions • American Literature • Children's books • Children's literature • English • Essays • Fairy tales • Fantasy • Folklore • foreign classics • plantation work • Short Stories • Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
• ISBN-10: 0-88001-326-5 / 0880013265
• ISBN-13: 978-0-88001-326-0 / 9780880013260