Books published by University Press of Mississippi

Robert Taylor was a central figure of Hollywood's classical era. In Robert Taylor: Male Beauty, Masculinity, and Stardom in Hollywood, Gillian Kelly investigates the initial construction and subsequent developments of Taylor's star persona across his thirty-five-year career.

Despite predictions that commercial mass culture would displace customs of the past, traditions firmly abound, often characterized as folklore. In The Practice of Folklore, author Simon Bronner works with theories of cultural practice to explain the social and psychological need for tradition in everyday life.

Brings together historians and literary scholars to explore the many facets of William Faulkner's relationship to history: the historical contexts of his novels and stories; his explorations of the historiographic imagination; his engagement with historical figures; and his influence on professional historians.

In this groundbreaking volume, Laurent Cugny examines and connects the theoretical and methodological processes that underlie all of jazz. Jazz in all its forms is researched and analysed by performers, scholars, and critics. This book is required reading for any serious study of jazz.

Provides a close reading of Rutu Modan's work and examines her role in creating a comics arts scene in Israel. Drawing on archival research, Kevin Haworth traces the history of Israeli comics from its beginning in the 1930s, to the counterculture movement of the 1970s, to the burst of creativity that began in the 1990s and continues today.

Neil Gaiman is one of the most critically decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years, but his work is under represented in sustained fashion in comics studies. The thirteen essays and two interviews with Gaiman and his frequent collaborator, artist P. Craig Russell, in this volume examine the work of Gaiman and his many illustrators.

Investigates lynching as a racialized practice of civic engagement, in effect an argument against black inclusion within the changing nation. Ersula Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today.

Ranging from 2001 to 2016, the twenty-three interviews collected in Conversations with Colson Whitehead reveal the workings of one of America's most idiosyncratic and most successful literary minds.

Explores how comics and notions of the sacred interweave new modes of seeing and understanding the sacral. Coeditors Assaf Gamzou and Ken Koltun-Fromm reveal the graphic character of sacred narratives, imagining new vistas for both comics and religious texts.

Presents the first collection of interviews with the renowned contemporary American author Gish Jen. Spanning more than two decades, beginning in 1991 and ending with a new, unpublished interview from 2017, these interviews provide readers a sense of Jen's development as a novelist and cultural critic.