Books by Jan Whitt

Dangerous Dreams: Essays on American Film and Television employs aesthetic, feminist, historical, Marxist, psychoanalytic, semiological, and sociological criticism to explore five decades of film and television texts that have captivated audiences. The study is divided into four sections, each comprised of several essays that explore the effects of narrative and visual texts.

This book celebrates the contributions of the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Owner and publisher of four weekly newspapers in Mississippi, Smith began her journalism career as a states rights Dixiecrat and segregationist, but became an icon for progressive thought on racial and ethnic issues.

A scholar of Southern literature and culture, Jan Whitt has written a personal narrative about adoption, childhood abuse, and fifty years of searching for her family in rural Appalachia. This book unflinchingly explores death and loss at the same time that it celebrates the transformative power of love and literature.

Settling the Borderland deals with the intimate connection between journalism and literature, both fields in which work by women has been underrepresented. This book has a twin focus: the work of journalists who became some of the greatest novelists, poets, and short-story writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America, several of whom are men, and contemporary journalists who best exemplify the effective use of literary techniques in news coverage. Although five women are emphasized here (Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Joan Didion, Sara Davidson, and Susan Orlean), three men whose work was profoundly influenced by journalism also are included. Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and John Steinbeck are well known as writers of poetry, short stories, and novels, but they, too, are among the 'other voices' rarely included in studies of literary journalism. In Settling the Borderland, Jan Whitt presents a thorough analysis of the increasingly indistinct lines between truth and fiction and between fact and creative narrative in contemporary media.

The previously untold stories of women throughout the history of journalism