Books published by University Press of Mississippi

Reveals Richard Wright's poetic vision toward the human world. These essays open up a new territory in Wright studies by tracing the development of Wright's aesthetic and its relationship to African and Japanese cultures.

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.

What made the American South different? This ever-fascinating question is approached from a new angle in this engaging collection of essays. By comparing the South with other cultures and by placing the southern experience in the broad context of world history, this volume brings into sharp focus the contours of southern peculiarity.

Anaïs Nin says:Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as basic as poetry.I would like to see women more concerned with women's contributions than with this great battle of attacking men. . . . We should be very busy creating the pattern of the new woman, honoring her gifts, finding out who were the women painters, who were the women historians, who were the women psychologists that we could be interested in. I think that would be much more beneficial.

In the 1930s two protest groups gained the public eye by role playing. They brought their social grievances to attention in their communities by staging mock performances. In this fascinating study of two strikes, Kirk W. Fuoss reports how the novel incidents of these protests unite the seemingly opposing forces of community and contestation.

Not all codes and traditions of the Old South ended abruptly with the Civil War. For many historians, however, there is truth in the thesis that the war marks the division between the Old South and the New South. To assess what happened to the old order during the tumultuous four years of the Confederacy, the essays in this book examine the South's dealing with the problem of continuity and persistence as a new era emerged. In the crucible of war what happened to the class system, to yeomen and planters, to millions of slaves, and to the common soldier? Myths and realities of the Old South undergo careful examination in this book of six papers from the Seventh Annual Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History (1981) at the University of Mississippi. Professor Emory M. Thomas, the foremost historian of the Confederate experience, defined the Confederacy as "an extended moment during which southerners attempted simultaneously to define themselves as a people and to act out a national identity," and he characterized the Confederacy as "the logical expression of antebellum southern ideology." The historians represented in this volume respond to Thomas's thesis and focus upon the theme of southern continuity or upon the lack of it.

The original essays gathered in this book make a beginning at exploring the cultural significance of The Name of the Rose in terms of its backgrounds and literary contexts. Eco's novel is examined in the light of several of the traditions from which it draws: theories of detective fiction, comedy, postmodernism, the apocalypse, semiotics, and literary criticism.

No other novel by William Faulkner has experienced the kind of dramatic critical re-evaluation that Sanctuary has received. Published in 1931, it seemed to many readers and critics in the thirties as a terrible misstep on Faulkner's part. This volume offers a close examination and interpretation of Sanctuary.

These six essays, originally printed in The Southern Quarterly, focus on the importance of the first modern novel to deal honestly with racial complexities in the South and with the transitional Creole society in which the attendant racial questions arose. The Grandissimes, set in the New Orleans of 1803 and published in 1880, is known as George Washington Cable's masterwork. In this novel he grappled with his love of the South and with some of the region's values which he found abhorrent. To commemorate the centennial of its publication, these essays attest to both the importance of Cable and of the novel. W. Kenneth Holditch's photo-essay depicts Cable's New Orleans as it exists today. Among the assessments is the editor's discussion of the southern racial dilemma as represented in Honor Grandissime. A lengthy annotated bibliography enhances this collection honoring the work of a local color writer, who, after Mark Twain, was the most notable southern author of his day.

This handy, compact, and authoritative volume provides readers and students with information about a multitude of Arthurian characters, places, themes, and topics from the first written records of early myths and legends through Sir Thomas Malory's epic Morte Darthur.

Mary McCarthy says:In general I would say that men actually have more feeling, and women perhaps more intelligence.I do seem to have some confessional impulse, and it may have to do with my Catholic training.The writer, if he has any ability, is looking for the revealing detail that will sum up the picture for the reader, in a flash of recognition.Ethics came to me in the frame of Christian teaching, and even though I don't believe in afterlife, I'm still concerned with the salvation of my soul.If you don't learn something from what you write, you might as well not write.

In little more than twenty years, playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) completed a ten-play cycle depicting African American life in the twentieth century, with each play taking place in a different decade. Conversations with August Wilson collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004.

This was the first book to cover all of Cold War air combat in the words of the men who waged it. In I Always Wanted to Fly, retired United States Air Force Colonel Wolfgang W.E. Samuel has gathered first-person memories from heroes of the cockpits and airstrips.

Presents the first in-depth study of the denomination's participation in civil rights politics. This title considers the extent to which the denomination's theology influenced how its members responded. It explores why a brave few Adventists became social and political activists, and why a majority of the faithful eschewed the movement.

Collected here are forty years of the thoughts of one of the most influential filmmakers of our time. This volume gives a privileged view of Bertolucci's career from the days of his first radical experiments to the present, when he has become an elder statesman of world cinema.

Collects new essays that address comics from a variety of viewpoints, including a piece from practicing artist Baru. The explorations range from discussion of such canonical works as Herge's Tintin series to such contemporary expressions as Baru's Road to America (2002), about the Algerian War. Included are close readings of specific comics series and graphic novels.

The essayists in this volume write about twentieth-century athletes whose careers were affected by racism and whose post-career reputations have improved as society's understanding of race changed. Contributors attempt to clarify the stories of these sports stars and their places as twentieth-century icons by analysing the various myths that surround them.

Queen Ida. Danny Poullard. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank. Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records. These names are all part of a vibrant scene of dancing and live Louisiana-French music that has evolved in Northern California. This title traces how this region of California has been able to develop and sustain this active regional music scene.

A great many commanders in the American Civil War (1861-1865) served in the Mexican War (1846-1848). Civil War Leadership and Mexican War Experience explores the influence of the earlier war on those men who would become leaders of Federal and Confederate forces.

Mississippi saw great change in the four decades after Reconstruction. Rednecks, Redeemers, and Race: Mississippi after Reconstruction, 1877-1917 examines the paradox of significant change alongside many unbroken continuities. It explores the reasons Mississippi was not more successful in urbanizing, industrializing, and reducing its reliance on cotton.

As children wrestle with culture through their games, recess itself has become a battleground for the control of children's time. Based on dozens of interviews and the observation of over a thousand children in a racially integrated, working-class public school, Recess Battles is a moving reflection of urban childhood at the turn of the millennium.

Disney artist Carl Barks (1901-2000) created one of Walt Disney's most famous characters, Scrooge McDuck. Barks also produced more than 500 comic book stories. His work is ranked among the most widely circulated, best-loved, and most influential of all comic book art. This book is the only comprehensive collection of Barks' interviews.

Examines the relationship between African Americans and one country, Germany, in great depth. Unlike many other countries in Europe, Germany has played a variety of different and conflicting roles in the African American narrative and relationship with Europe. It is this diversity of roles that adds to the complexity of African American and German interactions and mutual perceptions over time.

Creole cuisine, Cajun cooking, and the sophisticated gumbo of New Orleans - can any state boast a fais-do-do in the kitchen like Louisiana's? Originally published in 1954, Louisiana Cookery is the classic cookbook documenting the good times Louisianans associate with great food and recipes.

Collects nineteen interviews, conducted over the past two decades on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, with the author of Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day. The interviews collectively address the entirety of this literary artist's career, affording readers of Ishiguro the most vivid portrait yet of contexts and influences behind his novels.

Margaret Walker began her writing career as a poet in the late 1930s. But she was cast into the limelight in 1966 when her novel Jubilee was published to wide critical and commercial acclaim. In interviews ranging from 1972 to 1996, this collection captures Walker's voice as she discusses an incredibly wide range of interests.

Bordered by the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains, the Shenandoah Valley forms a natural corridor to the western parts of Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Scott Hamilton Suter documents the many peoples who have left their marks on the folkways of the region - Native Americans, Germans, Swiss, Scots-Irish, and African Americans.