Books published by University Press of Mississippi

A reassessment of the African American novelist and her position in the canonCONTRIBUTORSJohn Charles, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Bill V. Mullen, Rachel Peterson, Paula Rabinowitz, Rachel Rubin, James Smethurst, Melina Vizcaíno-AlemánThe essayists in Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left examine Ann Petry's relationship to left-wing political circles in the years following World War II. Anthologies dedicated to African American writing, even those that consider the African American literary left, often exclude Petry (1908-1997). These essayists demonstrate how Petry's literary art, as well as her engagement in various community struggles, landed her squarely in a variety of progressive communities.Through analyses of Petry's three novels, her short fiction, and her nonfiction, scholars identify her literary forms and aesthetics, including pulp fiction, Marxist analysis, literary naturalism, and the realism Petry used to explore early Cold War racial, sexual, and class politics. Although Petry is not readily placed in leftist circles, the essays collected here show her engagement in a number of events centered in post-WWII Harlem, such as the Bronx Slave Market protest concerning treatment of African American female domestic workers and her role as contributor to Harlem's radical periodical, the People's Voice. Essays show that Petry's writing provides an important link between the Popular Front of the 1930s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s.Alex Lubin, assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico, is the author of Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954, published by University Press of Mississippi.

When record men first travelled from Chicago or invited musicians to studios in New York, these entrepreneurs had no conception how their technology would change the dynamics of musical performance. 78 Blues covers a revolution in performance perception through close examination of hundreds of key "hillbilly" and "race" records released between the 1920s and World War II.

Through an examination of various couples who were forced to live in slavery, Rebecca J. Fraser argues that slaves found ways to conduct successful courting relationships. In its focus on the processes of courtship among the enslaved, this study offers further insight into the meanings that structured intimate lives.

An unflinching exploration of the sources of gruesome tales of bodily harm

This collection, the first English-language volume to gather international profiles and substantive interviews with Michael Winterbottom reveals how working with small crews, available light, handheld digital cameras, radio mics, and minuscule budgets allows him fewer constraints than most filmmakers, and the ability to capture the specificity of the locations where he shoots.

Explores sacred music and spiritual activism in a little-known region of the South, the Wiregrass Country of Georgia, Alabama, and North Florida. Jerrilyn McGregory examines African American sacred music outside of Sunday church-related activities, showing that singing conventions and anniversary programmes fortify spiritual as well as social needs.

In these more than twenty interviews dating from 1952 to the present, Paul Bowles gives a variety of answers that reveal as much as they conceal. Too gracious to refuse interviews, he regards inquiries with the same clear-eyed detachment that marks his prose.

Explores the implications of four public controversies about southern identity - debates about the Confederate flag in South Carolina, the gender integration of the Virginia Military Institute, the display of public art in Richmond, and Trent Lott's controversial comments regarding Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential bid.

Paule Marshall is a major contributor to the canons of African American and Caribbean American literature. Over the course of her fifty-year career, Marshall has published five novels, two collections of short stories, numerous essays, and a memoir. This is the first collection of her interviews, and provides the first comprehensive account of the stages of this writer's life.

As the interviews in this volume reveal, Jim Jarmusch has always been interested in mixing very different cultural ingredients to form something uncategorizably new in films that transcend the boundaries between high and low cultures.

Most Americans hold basic misconceptions about the Confederacy, the Civil War, and the actions of subsequent neo-Confederates. Errors persist because most have never read the key documents about the Confederacy. These documents, set in context by sociologist and historian James W. Loewen and co-editor, Edward H. Sebesta, put in perspective the mythology of the Old South.

Looks at a group of Mississippi teenagers whose entire high school experience, beginning in 1969, was under federal court-ordered racial integration. Through oral histories and other research, this group memoir considers how the students, despite their markedly different backgrounds, shared a common experience that greatly influences their present interactions and views of the world.

Unlike most public figures, William F. Winter wrote all of his own speeches. The Measure of Our Days: Writings of William F. Winter presents a collection of the governor's most thoughtful writings on his home state, the South, and America in general.

A multidisciplinary volume that reframes children as powerful forces in the production of their own literature and culture by uncovering a tradition of collaborative partnerships between adults and children in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. The intergenerational collaborations documented provide the foundations for some of the most popular Victorian literature for children.

"e;Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound . . . It's Superman!"e; Bending Steel examines the historical origins and cultural significance of Superman and his fellow American crusaders. Cultural historian Aldo J. Regalado asserts that the superhero seems a direct response to modernity, often fighting the interrelated processes of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and capitalism that transformed the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present. Reeling from these exciting but rapid and destabilizing forces, Americans turned to heroic fiction as a means of explaining national and personal identities to themselves and to the world. In so doing, they created characters and stories that sometimes affirmed, but other times subverted conventional notions of race, class, gender, and nationalism. The cultural conversation articulated through the nation's early heroic fiction eventually led to a new heroic type-the brightly clad, super-powered, pro-social action heroes that first appeared in American comic books starting in the late 1930s. Although indelibly shaped by the Great Depression and World War II sensibilities of the second-generation immigrants most responsible for their creation, comic book superheroes remain a mainstay of American popular culture. Tracing superhero fiction all the way back to the nineteenth century, Regalado firmly bases his analysis of dime novels, pulp fiction, and comics in historical, biographical, and reader response sources. He explores the roles played by creators, producers, and consumers in crafting superhero fiction, ultimately concluding that these narratives are essential for understanding vital trajectories in American culture.

Elizabeth Spencer is "a master storyteller" (San Francisco Chronicle). Whether she's writing short stories or novels, Spencer is acclaimed for holding her worlds up to light and turning them to see what they reflect. The Night Travellers, set in North Carolina and Montreal during the Vietnam War years, is her most revealing work yet.

After the United States purchased Louisiana, many inhabitants of the new American territory believed that Louisiana would quickly be incorporated into the Union and that they would soon enjoy rights as citizens. In March of 1804, however, Congress passed the Act for the Organization of Orleans Territory, which divided Louisiana into two sections: Orleans Territory, and the Louisiana District.

Analyses ways in which popular and visual culture used humour -in a variety of forms - to confront the attacks of September 11, 2001, and, more specifically, the aftermath. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from four countries to discuss the impact of humour and irony on both media discourse and tangible political reality.

Paul Auster (b. 1947) is one of the most critically acclaimed and intensely studied authors in America today. His varied career as a novelist, poet, translator, and filmmaker has attracted scholarly scrutiny from a variety of critical perspectives. This volume - the first of its kind on Auster - provides penetrating self-analysis and a range of biographical information and critical commentary.

Beauty pageants are wildly popular in the US Virgin Islands, capturing the attention of the local people from toddlers to seniors. Local beauty contests provide women opportunities to demonstrate talent, style, the values of black womanhood, and the territory's social mores. This title offers a comprehensive look at the centuries-old tradition of these expressions in the Virgin Islands.

A history of the alliance between black farmers, sharecroppers, and the People's Party

Essays that reveal the public slide into disrepute of oncecherished male sports iconsEssays by Lisa Doris Alexander, Gregory J. Kaliss, Jeffrey Lane, Thabiti Lewis, Robert F. Lewis II, Shelley Lucas, Roberta J. Newman, C. Oren Renick and Joel Nathan Rosen, and Sherrie L. WilsonFame to Infamy: Race, Sport, and the Fall from Grace follows the paths of sports figures who were embraced by the general populace but who, through a variety of circumstances, real or imagined, found themselves falling out of favor. The contributors focus on the roles played by athletes, the media, and fans in describing how once-esteemed popular figures find themselves scorned by the same public that at one time viewed them as heroic, laudable, or otherwise respectable.The book examines a wide range of sports and eras, and includes essays on Barry Bonds, Kirby Puckett, Mike Tyson, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, Branch Rickey, Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jim Brown, as well as an afterword by noted scholar Jack Lule and an introduction by the editors. Fame to Infamy is an interdisciplinary volume encompassing numerous approaches in tracing the evolution of each subject's reputation and shifting public image.David C. Ogden, Pacific Junction, Iowa, is associate professor of communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Joel Nathan Rosen, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is assistant professor of sociology at Moravian College. He is the author of The Erosion of the American Sporting Ethos: Shifting Attitudes toward Competition.

A probing of the many ways Faulkner interacted with the world's economiesWith contributions from Melanie R. Benson, Manuel Broncano, Keith Cartwright, Leigh Anne Duck, George B. Handley, Jeff Karem, Mario Materassi, John T. Matthews, Tierno Monénembo, Elizabeth Steeby, and Takako TanakaToday, debates about globalization raise both hopes and fears. But what about during William Faulkner's time? Was he aware of worldwide cultural, historical, and economic developments? Just how interested was Faulkner in the global scheme of things?The contributors to Global Faulkner suggest that a global context is helpful for recognizing the broader international meanings of Faulkner's celebrated regional landscape. Several scholars address how the flow of capital from the time of slavery through the Cold War period in his fiction links Faulkner's South with the larger world. Other authors explore the literary similarities that connect Faulkner's South to Latin America, Africa, Spain, Japan, and the Caribbean. In essays by scholars from around the world, Faulkner emerges in trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific contexts, in a pan-Caribbean world, and in the space of the Middle Passage and the African Atlantic. The Nobel laureate's fiction is linked to that of such writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Wole Soyinka, Miguel de Cervantes, and Kenji Nakagami.

Percival Everett (b. 1956) writes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, and is one of the most prolific, acclaimed, yet under-examined African American writers working today. In this volume, scholars engage all of his creative production. These essays examine issues of identity, authenticity, and semiotics, in addition to postmodernism and African American and American literary traditions.

The statement, "The Civil Rights Movement changed America", though true, has become something of a cliche. Civil rights in the White Literary Imagination seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron.