Books published by University Press of Mississippi

The interviews and conversations contained in this volume derive from four decades of Stanley Kunitz's distinguished career. They touch on aesthetic motifs in his poetry, the roots of his work, his friendships in the sister arts of painting and sculpture, his interactions with Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke, and his comments on a host of poets.

Woody Allen (b. 1935) is one of America's most idiosyncratic filmmakers, with an unparalleled output of nearly one film every year for over three decades. Woody Allen: Interviews collects over twenty-five years of interviews. The book's interviews reveal a serious director, often at odds with his onscreen persona as a lovable, slap-stick loser.

Examines the career, oeuvre, and literary theories of one of the most important Caribbean writers living today. An important addition to Caribbean literary studies, Patrick Chamoiseau is an indispensable work for scholars interested in francophone, Caribbean, and world literatures as well as cultural studies.

Based on new research and combining multiple scholarly approaches, these twelve essays tell new stories about the civil rights movement in the state most resistant to change. These essays introduce numerous new characters and conundrums into civil rights scholarship and advance efforts to study African Americans and whites as interactive agents in the complex stories.

Before the innovative work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied, and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, these folklorists worked within but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions. They often called into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged. Shirley Moody-Turner analyzes this output, along with the contributions of a disparate group of African American authors and scholars. She explores how black authors and folklorists were active participants-rather than passive observers-in conversations about the politics of representing black folklore. Examining literary texts, folklore documents, cultural performances, legal discourse, and political rhetoric, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation demonstrates how folklore studies became a battleground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The study is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import. What role have representations of black folklore played in constructing racial identity? And, how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage black traditions? Moody-Turner renders established historical facts in a new light and context, taking figures we thought we knew-such as Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, and Paul Laurence Dunbar-and recasting their place in African American intellectual and cultural history.

Here, in his own colourful, slangy words, is the true American Dream saga of a self-proclaimed "film geek". Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, revised and updated with twelve new interviews, is a joy to read cover to cover because its subject has so much interesting and provocative to say about his own movies and about cinema in general, and also about his unusual life.

This is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts, Veronica T. Watson identifies this body of literature as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that she names "the literature of white estrangement".

Global in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, Creolization as Cultural Creativity explores the expressive forms and performances that come into being when cultures encounter one another. Creolization is presented as a powerful marker of identity in the postcolonial Creole societies of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the southwest Indian Ocean region.

A wide-ranging survey of how comics have portrayed southern ways of lifeContributions from Tim Caron, Brannon Costello, Brian Cremins, Conseula Francis, Anthony Dyer Hoefer, M. Thomas Inge, Nicolas Labarre, Alison Mandaville, Gary Richards, Joseph Michael Sommers, Christopher Whitby, and Qiana J. WhittedComics and the U.S. South offers a wide-ranging and long overdue assessment of how life and culture in the United States South is represented in serial comics, graphic novels, newspaper comic strips, and webcomics. Diverting the lens of comics studies from the skyscrapers of Superman's Metropolis or Chris Ware's Chicago to the swamps, back roads, small towns, and cities of the U.S. South, this collection critically examines the pulp genres associated with mainstream comic books alongside independent and alternative comics. Some essays seek to discover what Captain America can reveal about southern regionalism and how slave narratives can help us reread Swamp Thing; others examine how creators such as Walt Kelly (Pogo), Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), and Josh Neufeld (A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge) draw upon the unique formal properties of the comics to question and revise familiar narratives of race, class, and sexuality; and another considers how southern writer Randall Kenan adapted elements of comics form to prose fiction. With essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, Comics and the U.S. South contributes to and also productively reorients the most significant and compelling conversations in both comics scholarship and in southern studies.Brannon Costello, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University and is the editor of Howard Chaykin: Conversations (University Press of Mississippi). Qiana J. Whitted, Columbia, South Carolina, is associate professor of English and African American studies at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of "A God of Justice?": The Problem of Evil in Twentieth-Century Black Literature.

Explores the ways in which William Faulkner's fiction addresses and destabilizes the concept of whiteness in American culture. Collectively, the essays argue that whiteness, as part of the Nobel Laureate's consistent querying of racial dynamics, is a central element. This anthology places Faulkner's oeuvre in the contexts of its contemporary literature and academic trends exploring race and texts.

The early 1980s saw a revolution in mainstream comics as new methods of publishing and distribution broadened the possibilities. Among those artists utilizing these new methods, Chester Brown quickly developed a cult following. This volume presents interviews covering all facets of the cartoonist's long career and includes several pieces from now-defunct periodicals and fanzines.

The author of more than twenty-five books, Percival Everett has established himself as one of America's - and arguably the world's - premier twenty-first-century fiction writers. Interviews collected in this volume display Everett's abundant wit as well as the independence of thought that has led to his work's being described as "characteristically uncharacteristic".

Unlike some folklore anthologies, New York State Folklife Reader does not follow an organizational plan based on regions or genres. Because the New York Folklore Society has always tried to "give folklore back to the people," the editors decided to divide the edited volume into sections about life processes that all New York state residents share.

The true life story of Elvis's original guitarist, the masterful Scotty Moore

Explores some of the specific ideologies at work in William Faulkner's historical and socioeconomic moment, as well as his unique implementation of those ideologies in his fiction. The essays range from consideration of southern politics and history, consumer culture, race, and gender to theoretical speculation on the nature and impact of ideological analysis itself.

Although Stanley Kubrick adapted novels and short stories, his films deviate in notable ways from the source material. In particular, since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), his films seem to definitively exploit all cinematic techniques, embodying a compelling visual and aural experience. But, as author Elisa Pezzotta contends, it is for these reasons that his cinema becomes the supreme embodiment of the sublime, fruitful encounter between the two arts and, simultaneously, of their independence. Stanley Kubrick's last six adaptations-2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999)-are characterized by certain structural and stylistic patterns. These features help to draw conclusions about the role of Kubrick in the history of cinema, about his role as an adapter, and, more generally, about the art of cinematic adaptations. The structural and stylistic patterns that characterize Kubrick adaptations seem to criticize scientific reasoning, causality, and traditional semantics. In the history of cinema, Kubrick can be considered a modernist auteur. In particular, he can be regarded as an heir of the modernist avant-garde of the 1920s. However, author Elisa Pezzotta concludes that, unlike his predecessors, Kubrick creates a cinema not only centered on the ontology of the medium, but on the staging of sublime, new experiences.

Are traditions of popular theatre still alive in politically-engaged theatre today? In San Francisco they are. The San Francisco Mime Troupe is a modern link in the long history of public performances that have a merry air but have a voice of political protest. This book explores the historical origins of the popular forms the Mime Troupe draws on.

Many studies of African-American gospel music spotlight history and style. This one, however, is focused mainly on grassroots makers and singers. Most of those included here are not stars. Yet their collective stories presented in this book indicate that black gospel music is one of the most prevalent forms of contemporary American song.

Features interviews that span Alan Ball's entire career and include detailed observations and insights into his Academy Award-winning film American Beauty and Emmy Award-winning television shows Six Feet Under and True Blood.

Female athletes are too often perceived as interlopers in the historically male-dominated world of sports. Obstacles specific to women are of particular focus in A Locker Room of Her Own. Central to this volume is the contention that women are placed in a unique position even more complicated than the usual experiences of inequality and discord associated with race and sports.

By examining the novels of critically and commercially successful authors such as Sarah Dessen, Stephenie Meyer, and Laurie Halse Anderson, Reading Like a Girl explores the use of narrative intimacy as a means of reflecting and reinforcing larger, often contradictory, cultural expectations regarding adolescent women, interpersonal relationships, and intimacy.

Starts from the proposition that folklore - usually thought of in its historical social context as "oral tradition" - is easily appropriated and recycled into other contexts. Folklore Recycled discusses the larger issue of folklore being recycled into non-folk contexts, and proceeds to look at a number of instances of repurposing.

Despite their commercial appeal and cross-media reach, superheroes are only recently starting to attract sustained scholarly attention. This groundbreaking collection brings together essays and book excerpts by major writers on comics and popular culture.