Description
Dolly Parton isn’t only a country music superstar. She has built an empire. On the heart of that empire is Dollywood, a 150-acre fantasy land that hosts three million people a year. Parton’s prodigious talent and unbelievable celebrity have allowed her to turn her fatherland into one of the crucial popular tourist destinations in The usa. The crux of Dollywood’s allure is its precisely calibrated Appalachian image, itself drawn from Parton’s very real hardscrabble childhood in the mountains of east Tennessee.
What does Dollywood have to offer but even so entertainment? What do we find if we take this remarkable place seriously? How does it both confirm and subvert outsiders’ expectations of Appalachia? What does it let us know about the up to date South, and in turn what does that let us know about The usa at large? How is regional identity molded in service of commerce, and what’s the interplay of race, gender, and class when that happens?
In Gone Dollywood, Graham Hoppe blends tourism studies, celebrity studies, cultural analysis, folklore, and the acute observations and personal reflections of longform journalism into an unforgettable interrogation of Southern and American identity.