Helen Morales moved from Cambridge, England, to Santa Barbara, California, where she is the Argyropoulos Professor of Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
'This is not a book written from the Olympic heights of an objective observer, ' writes Morales in the introduction to her funny, engaging and erudite book. 'I confess up front that I love Dolly Parton and her music.' -- Times (UK) It'll make you want to experience your own pilgrimage, with the windows down and 'Jolene' blaring. -- Bust Morales has made a moving, provocative pilgrimage through the complex culture--mainly southern--that produces country music and some of its outsized performers. I found her very readable. --Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove The heart of the book is Morales's personal meditation on the Dollywood shrine itself, the theme park for feminism, Christianity, and the Old South, its mythical log-cabin home, its worshippers at the Dolly Dollar cash-tills, and the reputation of the whole (deserved or not: discuss) as 'the redneck Disneyland.' This is cultural criticism on holiday . . . frank, self-revelatory, comic and clever, revealing greater identification with the heroine than her day job traditionally allows. -- Times Literary Supplement Part quirky travelogue, part study of celebrity culture, part autobiography, Pilgrimage to Dollywood is a witty and self-aware account of being transplanted into an alien culture and deciding to revel in its (and one's own) otherness. -- Times Higher Education