"In the Tennessee Mountains," by Mary Noailles Murfree, depicted the scenery and people of the Tennessee mountains during the 19th century. At a time when local color fiction was much in vogue throughout the country, Murfree came to prominence as the most noted writer using the southern mountains as the setting for her fiction. "In the Tennessee Mountains," a collection of eight stories set in either the Cumberland Mountains or the Great Smoky Mountains, was Murfree's first book. Each of the stories had been published ...
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"In the Tennessee Mountains," by Mary Noailles Murfree, depicted the scenery and people of the Tennessee mountains during the 19th century. At a time when local color fiction was much in vogue throughout the country, Murfree came to prominence as the most noted writer using the southern mountains as the setting for her fiction. "In the Tennessee Mountains," a collection of eight stories set in either the Cumberland Mountains or the Great Smoky Mountains, was Murfree's first book. Each of the stories had been published previously in the Atlantic Monthly under the pen name Charles Egbert Craddock. For years readers had been curious about the identity of the mysterious "Craddock." The Boston editors and publishers with whom Murfree corresponded knew the author only as "M. N. Murfree," and assumed that the writer was male. The secret was at last revealed in 1885, when Murfree, her sister, and father journeyed to Boston to meet with an astonished editor of the Atlantic Monthly. "In the Tennessee Mountains" has been criticized for its stereotyping of the mountaineer and its highly romanticized descriptions of the landscape. Almost every reader notices the wide gap between the tone and vocabulary of the narrator and the mountain dialect of her characters. Like many other local color writers, Murfree felt it necessary to provide as narrator a cultured, sophisticated intermediary, someone like the reader she hoped to reach. Despite the critics, "In the Tennessee Mountains" is an essential in the study of Appalachian literature.
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Add this copy of In the Tennessee Mountains Classic Short Stories Set in to cart. $8.00, good condition, Sold by Ann Open Book rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES, published 2010 by Feather Trail Press.
