Joel Chandler Harris 
Uncle Remus, his songs and his sayings 

Uncle Remus, his songs and his sayings – Joel Chandler Harris – Uncle Remus is the fictional title character and narrator of a collection of African-American folktales adapted and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris, published in book form in 1881. A journalist in post-Reconstruction Atlanta, Georgia, Harris produced seven Uncle Remus books. Harris wanted to show that life in the Southern United States was hard and that they struggled a lot. The term that comes along with this is ‘folk uncanny’. Harris wrote these stories to represent the struggle in the Southern United States, and more specifically in the plantations. He did so by introducing tales he had heard and framing them in the plantation context. These stories were written in a dialect that represented the voice of the narrators and their subculture. It is for this choice of framing that his collection has led to controversy.

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Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist born in Eatonton, Georgia who wrote the Uncle Remus stories, including Uncle Remus; His Songs and His Sayings, The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1881 & 1882), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), and Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1905).

The stories, based on the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect and in featuring a trickster hero called Br’er (‘Brother’) Rabbit, who uses his wits against adversity, though his efforts do not always succeed. The frog is the trickster character in traditional tales in Central and Southern Africa. The stories, which began appearing in the Atlanta Constitution in 1879, were popular among both Black and White readers in the North and South, not least because they presented an idealized view of race relations soon after the Civil War. The first published Brer Rabbit stories were written by President Theodore Roosevelt’s uncle, Robert Roosevelt.