ABSTRACT
For the past forty years or more, scholars have been preoccupied with humorists of the American Southwest, who have been seen as heartily and naturally American because of their depiction of country ruffians speaking in low-class, or “vernacular,” dialect and expressing frontier viewpoints. The political vision of the federalist founding fathers and the social values of the Protestant ethic and Jeffersonian democracy are central components of American comic literature. Yet, almost no attention has been paid to the large number of comic writers in the Northeast who sought to integrate these values with the growing vil lage, urban, and commercial experience of the capitalist and indus trialist Northeast. The Knickerbocker and Yankee humorists have re ceived attention in a handful of excellent studies, but there has not yet been a fair and comprehensive representation of the full range of northeastern humorists as a consistent school of writers. Writers in the Northeast covered as broad a range of classes and dialects, from the top to the bottom of the social scale, as did their counterparts in the Southwest. But the literary humorists of the North, rather than punishing vice in violent action, also resorted to irony and burlesque in their class-conscious, literary-conscious writings. These techniques linked them to their British roots and freed them to combine the long standing tradition of ethical humanism in Puritan New England and Quaker Philadelphia with the emerging world of industrial and urban America in the 1830-1890 period. In the 1860s Mark Twain, the greatest writer of the northeastern school, raised this tradition from a regional to a national and international vision. He continued to insist on the interrelationships between political, social, economic, and moral terminology even as the postindustrial modern age emerged in the 1890s, and, seemingly, made much of his comic terminology obsolete. As these examples from a broad range of the most important north eastern humorists will show, the humor of the urban Northeast was
grounded in American idealism, and it was from the idealist’s perspec tive that these writers viewed the changing landscape of the urban Northeast and subsequently of all America.
