Yankee Comic Character: Its Origins and Development in American Literature Through 1830

Abstract

This study attempts to address why the Yankee comic character became the butt of early American humor and how the character developed into an enduring comic figure in American literature. The Yankee comic character has developed into one of the most enduring comic characters in American Literature, appearing many times in Mark Twain's fiction and in various works of comedy in the twentieth century. Many scholars have addressed the development of the Yankee in American literature after the 1830s, but little attention is paid to the origins of this character type and the development of the Yankee character into the mature, well-developed type of the 1830s. The Yankee character was at once both a simple, naive rustic with a unique dialect and a shrewd, practical manipulator full of ambition and greed. As he changes and develops, the Yankee comic character embodies the complexities and incongruities of a democratic society struggling to fuse the ideal with the real, the language of culture with the language of the ordinary man.