GUTOWSKI, John A.

p. 128: [T]he American tradition does distinguish itself, through its nurturing of mythical animals and their quest, from the nation's beginnings up to the present day. This is especially noticeable in American folk tradition.

"The Protofestival: Local Guide to American Folk Behavior" dansJournal of the Folklore Institute. Vol. 15, no 2 (May-Aug., 1978), p. 113-132.

GUTOWSKI, John A.

p. 127: [T]he protofestival concept helps underscore the manner in which a community blends folk behavior with mass media involvement into a distinctly American cultural pattern.

"The Protofestival: Local Guide to American Folk Behavior" dans Journal of the Folklore Institute. Vol. 15, no 2 (May-Aug., 1978), p. 113-132.

BEAUCHEMIN, Jean-François

Enfin, je saisis l'image de père palabrant avec ses gens et effectuant pour eux les actes les plus bizarres, tels qu'ils ont été narrés par-devant vous, Monsieur le juge, et ci-devant votre face aussi, Membres du jury de ce tribuneau. (90)

Jean-François Beauchemin. Le Jour des corneilles. Éditions Les Allusifs, Montréal, 2004, 152 p. 

HARTE, Bret

p. 18

When night crept up again through the gorges, the reedy notes of the accordion rose and fell in fitful spasms and long-drawn gasps by the flickering campfire. But music failed to fill entirely the aching void left by insufficient food, and a new diversion was proposed by piney — storytelling. [...] Some months before he had chanced upon a stray copy of Mr. Pope's ingenious translation of the Iliad. He now proposed to narrate the principal incidents of that poem — having thoroughly mastered the argument and fairly forgotten the words — in the current vernacular of Sandy Bar. And so for the rest of that night the Homeric demigods again walked the earth. Trojan bully and wily Greek wrestled in the winds, and the great pines in the canyon seemed to bow to the wrath of the son of Peleus. Mr. Oakhurst listened with quiet satisfaction. Most especially was he interested in the fate of "Ash-heels," as the Innocent persisted on denominating the "swift-footed Achilles."

"The Outcasts of Poker Flat" dans The Luck of Roaring Camp & Other Stories, 1968.

TWAIN, Mark

p. 58 :

[…] and from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of date and locality and branched out into a narrative that bristled all along with incredible adventures, a narrative that was so reeking with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most engaging and unconscious personal villainies that I sat speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping. [...] It was a sore blight to find out afterward that he was a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into this yarn and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me until he had come to believe it himself. (p. 58)

(Old Times on the Mississippi, cité dans The Portable Mark Twain, 1985)

KOUWENHOVEN, John A.

p. 5 :

The least mechanized of all aspects of our society – the lives of men and women on the advancing frontier – depended upon the machine-made rifles and revolvers which enabled the pioneers to kill game and outfight the Indians, upon the steamboats and railroads which opened up new country for settlement, and upon the telegraph which made rapid intercommunication possible.

(The Arts in Modern American Civilization, 1967)

COOVER, Robert

p. 6 :

Not that Americans are superstitious, of course. How could they be, citizens of this, the most rational nation (under God) on earth? They need no omens to pull a switch, turn a buck, or change the world, for these are the elected sons and daughters of Uncle Sam, né Sam Slick, that wily Yankee Peddler who, much like that ballsy Greek girl of long ago, popped virgin-born and fully constituted from the shattered seed-poll of the very Enlightenment – « slick, » as the Evangels put it, « as a snake out of a black skin! » Young Sam, « lank as a leafless elm, » already chin-whiskered and plug-hatted and all rigged out in his long-tailed blue and his striped pantaloons, his pockets stuffed with pitches, patents, and pyrotechnics, burst upon the withering Old World like a Fourth of July skyrocket, snorting and neighing like a wild horse : « Who – Whoo – Whoop! Who’ll come gouge with me? Who’ll come bite with me? Rowff – Yough – Snort – YAHOO! In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress, I have passed the Rubicon – swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, I’m in fer a fight, I’ll go my death on a fight, and with a firm reliance on the pertection of divine protestants, a fight I must have, or else I’ll have to be salted down to save me from spilin’! You hear me over thar, you washed-up varmints? This is the hope of the world talkin’ to you! I am Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler – I can ride on a flash of lightnin’, catch a thunderbolt in my fist, swaller niggers whole, raw or cooked, slip without a scratch down a honey locust, whup my weight in wildcats and redcoats, squeeze blood out of a turnip and cold cash out of a parson, and out-insructabullize the heatin Chinee […]! Lo, I say unto you, I have put a crimp in a cat-a-mount with my bare hands, hugged a cinnamon b’ar to death, and made a grizzly sing « Jesus, Lover of My Soul » in a painful duet with his own arsehole – and I have not yet begun to fight! Yippee! I’m wild and woolly and fulla fleas, ain’t never been curried below the knees, so if you wish to avoid foreign collision you had better abandon the ocean, women and children first! For we hold these truths to be self-evident : […] that nothing is sartin’ but death, taxes, God’s glowin’ Covenant, enlightened self-interest, certain unalienated rights, and woods, woods, woods, as far as the world extends!

(The Public Burning, 1977)

EGGERS, Dave

p. 47 :

Please look. Can you see us? Can you see us, in our little red car? Picture us from above, as if you were flying above us, in, say, a helicopter, or on the back of a bird, as our car hurtles, low to the ground, straining on the slow upward trajectory but still at sixty, sixty-five, around the relentless, sometimes ridiculous bends of Highway 1. Look at us, goddammit, the two of us slingshotted from the backside of the moon, greedily cartwheeling toward everything we are owed. Every day we are collecting on what's coming to us, each day we're being paid pack for what is owed, what we deserve, with interest, with some extra motherfucking consideration - we are owed, goddammit - and so we are expecting everything, everything. [...]

[...] Try to stop us, you pussy! You can't stop us from singing, and you can't stop us from making fart sounds, from putting our hands out the window to test the aerodynamics of different hand formations, from wiping the contents of our noses under the front of our seats. You cannot stop me from having Toph, who is eight, steer, on a straightaway, while I take off my sweatshirt because suddenly it's gotten really fucking hot. [...]

To our right is the Pacific, and because we are hundreds of feet above the ocean, often with nothing in the way of guardrail between us and it, there is sky not only above us but below us, too. Toph does not like the cliff, is not looking down, but we are driving in the sky, with clouds whipping over the road, the sun flickering through, the sky and ocean below. Only up here does the earth look round, only up here does the horizon dip at its ends, only up here can you see the bend of the planet at the edges of your peripheries. Only here you are almost sure that you are careening on top of a big shiny globe, blurrily spinning - you are never aware of these things in Chicago, it being so flat, so straight - and and and we have been chosen, you see, chosen, and have been given this, this being owed to us, earned by us, all of this - the sky is blue for us, the sun makes passing cars twinkle like toys for us, the ocean undulates and churns for us, murmurs and coos to us. We are owed, see, this is ours, see. We are in California, living in Berkeley, and the sky out here is bigger than anything we've ever seen - it goes on forever, is visible from every other hilltop - hilltops! - every turn on the roads of Berkeley, of San Francisco -

(A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2000)