Books published by University of Georgia Press

Faced with Eudora Welty's preference for the oblique in literary performances, some have assumed that she was not concerned with issues of race. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines Welty's handling of race, the colour line, and Jim Crow segregation and sheds new light on her views about the patterns, insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness.

Poetry, for Jed Rasula, bears traces of our entanglement with our surroundings. In this work he surveys both the convictions asserted by American poets and the poetics they develop in their craft, all with an eye toward an emerging ecological worldview. A range of different poets is examined.

Poetry without frontiers, unmoored from expectations, and sometimes even written in imaginary languages; Bruns shows us why, for the sake of all poetry, we should embrace its anarchic, vitalizing ways.

Cottrol takes the reader on a journey from the origins of New World slavery in colonial Latin America to current debates and litigation over affirmative action in Brazil and the United States, as well as contemporary struggles against racial discrimination and Afro-Latin invisibility in the Spanish-speaking nations of the hemisphere.

The story of the largest racial job discrimination class action lawsuit of its time, involving the Shoney's restaurant chain in 1988, and serving as a stark refutation that the civil rights movement eliminated systemic discrimination from the workplace.

Examining the science of stream restoration, Rebecca Lave argues that the neoliberal emphasis on the privatization and commercialization of knowledge has fundamentally changed the way that science is funded, organised, and viewed in the United States.

Farmers markets have become essential to the movement for food-system reform and are a shining example of a growing green economy where consumers can shop their way to social change. Black, White, and Green brings new energy to this topic by exploring dimensions of race and class as they relate to farmers markets and the green economy.

Argues that southern literary studies has been over-idealized and dominated by intellectual history for too long. In Reading for the Body, Jay Watson calls for the field to be rematerialized and grounded in an awareness of the human body as the site where ideas, including ideas about the US South itself, ultimately happen.

Essex offers a sophisticated study of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), examining the separate but intertwined discourses of geopolitics and geoeconomics. Providing a unique geographical analysis of American development policy, he traces the agency's growth from the Cold War into an era of neoliberal globalization.

Eleven stories set in San Francisco chronicle the lives of characters who avoid middle class lifestyles while clinging to their idealism about love and life.

To be untethered in the waking world, to have the feeling that perhaps we are sleepwalking-that's what life can be like for the people in these eleven stories by Peter LaSalle, known to readers of leading literary magazines for his luminous prose style and narrative daring.

Covering an era from the early twentieth century to the present, this volume features twenty-seven South Carolina women of varied backgrounds whose stories reflect the ever-widening array of activities and occupations in which women were engaged in a transformative era that included depression, world wars, and dramatic changes in the role of women.

Covering an era from the early twentieth century to the present, this volume features twenty-seven South Carolina women of varied backgrounds whose stories reflect the ever-widening array of activities and occupations in which women were engaged in a transformative era that included depression, world wars, and dramatic changes in the role of women.

Argues that by delineating the need for cheap, flexible farm labour as a problem and solving it via the importation of relatively disempowered migrant workers, an alliance of growers and government actors committed the United States to an agricultural system that is, in important respects, still in existence.

This is Jill Christman's account of her first 30 years. Her story runs the gamut of dramatic life events, including childhood sexual abuse, accidental death and psychological trauma, but her memoir is more than a litany of horrors: it is an open-eyed, wide-hearted look at a life worth surviving.

In 1818, Edmund Ruffin, then a young Virginia planter, began conducting chemical and rotational experiments on his Coggin's Point plantation on the James River. Tracing Ruffin's passionate advocacy of both agricultural reform and slavery, William M. Mathew pinpoints in this book many of the contradictions that underlay the economic and social structures of the antebellum South.

The centerpiece of this generously annotated book is the diary kept by the celebrated agricultural reformer Edmund Ruffin during the eight months in 1843 when, at the request of Governor James Henry Hammond, he conducted an economic survey of South Carolina, traveling to every corner of the state to examine the different farming methods in use and the resources available for their improvement.

One of the most influential modern poets, Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) was awarded virtually every major American prize for poetry. Written mostly by other poets, in styles ranging from the informal to the scholarly, these essays explore Hecht's image and poetic devices, his debts to other poets, and his place in the study of modern poetry.

In Sydney Lea's poems, purest joy and woe flash amid the mundane, and beauty knows the full range of nature - from the plumed tension of a newborn child twisting away from the ready breast to bright birds lying dead on the winter lawn.

Alan Watson argues that a close examination of the Gospels in their historic and religious context reveals St. Mark's text as the most plausible account of how Jesus saw himself and how he was perceived by his contemporaries. In the gospel of Mark, Watson says that we see a Jesus who was basically apolitical, hostile to dogma, and deliberately incomprehensible to his followers and enemies.

Studies the first Christian martyr, who was stoned to death by a mob outside of Jerusalem around AD36 during his trial by the supreme rabbinic court for blasphemy against the Jewish faith. Alan Watson focuses on Stephen's enthralling defense speech, as found solely in the Acts of Apostles, which is both the pivotal and, until now, least understood part of the fatal proceedings.

Measures the success of Jesus's ministry by explaining his attitude toward, and knowledge of, certain laws and legal customs. Alan Watson argues that Jesus engendered harsh responses from his fellow Jews by his apparently contemptuous or insensitive behaviour that stemmed from a lack of knowledge or concern about legal and rabbinic strictures.

Argues that by virtue of Jesus's conviction and crucifixion at the hands of the Romans he failed to fulfil the prophecy of his messiahship in the manner he had intended. Jesus's destiny, as he saw it, was to be condemned by the Jewish authorities to death by stoning. This is just one of the provoking insights in Alan Watson's fresh interpretation of the arrest, trial, and conviction of Jesus.

In Jesus and the Jews, Alan Watson reveals and substantiates a central yet previously unrecognized source for the composition of the Gospel of John. Strikingly antithetical to John's basic message, this source originated from an anti-Christian tradition promulgated by the Pharisees, the powerful and dogmatic teachers of Jewish law. The aims of this Pharisaic tradition, argues Watson, included discrediting Jesus as the Messiah, minimizing his historical importance, and justifying the Jewish authorities' role in his death. Jesus and the Jews joins three other works by Watson--The Trial of Jesus, Jesus and the Law, and Jesus: A Profile--to examine the early dynamism of western religion through refocused attention on biblical texts and other historical sources.

Examines the decisions of Supreme Court justice and Harvard law professor Joseph Story (1779-1845). Demonstrating the odd twists and turns that legal development sometimes takes, the book is also a fascinating case study that reveals much about the relationship of law to society.

In this book, Peter Stitt presents interviews with five American poets--Richard Wilbur, William Stafford, Louis Simpson, James Wright, and Robert Penn Warren--and critical essays on their works, uniting the objectivity and insight of the critic with the words and vision of the artist.

On Jordan's Stormy Banks is a social history of southern evangelicalism from the late eighteenth century to the end of Reconstruction. By focusing on the three largest evangelical denominations in a single state - Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian - Randy J. Sparks charts the rise of evangelicals on the southern frontier and their remarkable increase in numbers, wealth, and influence throughout the remainder of the period. Beginning as a rebellious movement of the plain folk, evangelicals set themselves up to challenge the social hierarchy and even welcomed slaves into their congregations on terms approaching equality. Although evangelicals had largely abandoned formal opposition to slavery by the time the movement reached Mississippi, their relationship to the institution was complex and conflicted. Sparks demonstrates that the typical evangelical church was biracial and that the African-American influence in ritual and practice left an indelible imprint on southern religion. The egalitarian nature of these early churches created unique opportunities for women and blacks, and Sparks pays close attention to the important role of the female majority of church members. Similarly, evangelical practice and rhetoric was consciously democratic, linking the movement with republican virtue. By the 1830s, the evangelicals in Mississippi had so prospered that their churches grew from sects to major denominations. This shift to the establishment divided the traditionalists from the modernists within each denomination. As the evangelicals began to have a marked influence on southern society, they sought to perfect rather than abolish slavery, and egalitarian biracialism gave way to separateworship services, a practice that fueled the development of independent African-American churches following the Civil War. The orderly society that evangelicals labored to create - one organized around the patriarchal household - unraveled at the end of the Civil War, says Sparks. For whites, evangelicalism became entwined with the Religion of the Lost Cause; for African Americans, the Confederate defeat came as an answered prayer as they began to carve out an autonomous religious life for themselves that would prove to be the bedrock of the African-American community. This separation of Mississippi's major denominations along racial lines dramatically marked the end of the evangelical movement's first century.

With wit and insight, Thomas J. Roberts reassesses popular writing forms, such as westerns, romances, and fantasies, that are often denigrated and explores the motives and experiences of readers of these genres. Drawing widely from literary criticism, the sociology and psychology of literature, and popular culture, this is an incisive examination of our discretionary reading tastes.