10 April, 2006

Jimmy Cantrell’s Book Out

Posted by alex in authors, books at 9:29 pm | Permanent Link

cantrellcelt.jpg[Amazon reviews of Jimmy Cantrell’s book, him being the proud advocate of the bigoted and wrong Celtics-created-everything -of-value school, nevertheless a fine and interesting writer who’s always been one of our favorites.]

The Real Southern Literature, January 18, 2006

Reviewer:    C. Harris Collier, III (Athens, Georgia) – See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
I’m a general reader and admirer of Southern literature. It is an easy to read and thought provoking book. It’s helping me appreciate my culture and its great writers. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Pat Conroy. I appreciate how the scholar-like Cantrell takes fellow Georgian Margaret Mitchell seriously.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Lively and fresh approach , January 18, 2006
Reviewer:    jkibler (Maybinton, South Carolina) – See all my reviews

Few critical works have the power to change the way a whole genre is perceived. This is one of them. The reader who digests this book will never look at American literature, and most particularly Southern literature, the same way again. I enjoyed it thoroughly. The writing is lively and will not bore to tears—as the great majority of current careerist criticism out of academia is likely to do. While scholarly, it is a work that is open to a wide audience, any audience who likes to read.
I give it my highest commendation.

Link.


  • 4 Responses to “Jimmy Cantrell’s Book Out”

    1. Sergei Says:

      What’s Cantrell been up to anyway since thepatriotist.com stopped updating? I haven’t come across any new writing of his on the net.

      One of my favorites since I came across his stuff on LewRockwell.com six years ago.

    2. alex Says:

      I don’t think he’s written articles on the ‘Net the last couple years. I suppose he’s teaching or working on another book.

    3. Angle Says:

      Southerners come from Northern Ireland (Protestant planters), lowland Scotland and England. The Northern Irish are a mix of Scots and Anglo Borderers. Some Highlanders – real Celts – were in the Carolinas, but they aren’t known for their written culture. In a word, Southerners are more Anglo-Saxon than ‘Celtic’. For a start, none of the stocks making up the South have ever spoken Gaelic, apart from the Highlanders. The British laugh at these American presumptions about ethnicity, although it’s beginning to infect this country with the ‘Celtic fringe’ myth bollocks in order to deflect imperial guilt onto England and to reclaim their sense of nationality as London/England turns to mud and ceases to represent the English, to say less of the other British nations (though books like ‘How the Scots created the Empire’ show them caught between two desires). It’s all part of Cantrell’s attempt to pit the ‘Celtic’ South against the ‘puritan’ north, which is one of his favourite themes on the Patriotist website. And yet Calvinism is a form of puritanism – and Scots and Northern Irish are famous Calvinists.

      In the 19th century, Lord Macaulay opined that the Lowland Scots and the Northern Irish planters were ‘Saxons’, in contrast to the Irish Gaels and the British Highlanders. In fact, the Highlanders themselves used to be called ‘Irish’. Anyway, no one in Britain talks about ‘Celts’ and ‘Anglos’, but about English and Scots and Welsh.

    4. alex Says:

      Good post, Angle. Cantrell is certainly a bigot, but I’ve learned a lot from him.