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Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region. Edited by Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Pp. xi, 350. Foreword, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, contributors, and index. $29.95.)
Robert Schenkkan's The Kentucky Cycle-a very bad play that, amazingly, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1992 (which speaks volumes about how truly meaningful such awards are)-was the impetus for this collection of essays. The volume began as a series of responses to Schenkkan's play before it took on a broader focus. One could probably discern this fact, even if editor Dwight Billings did not explicitly state it in his introduction because most of the twenty-two essays refer to The Kentucky Cycle. Billings and his colleagues see this drama as merely the latest episode in a tradition of stereotyping Appalachia and its people that dates back well over a hundred years. Stereotypers consistently find southern Appalachian mountaineers representatives of a homogeneous culture that is in, but not of, America. Geographically isolated, they are inbred, suspicious of outsiders, clannish, inclined toward feuding, somewhat childish, poor, and in general out of touch with modern mainstream society. In other words, the region and its inhabitants are viewed one-dimensionally.
Presented in five sections, the essays in Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes challenge historical representations of Appalachia and its population put forth by Schenkkan and other literary figures, most notably turn of the century novelist John Fox, Jr. They also provide accounts of personal experiences and activism by various groups of mountaineers that contradict negative stereotypes. Only the last four...