Books published by University Press of Mississippi

In the wake of the Civil War, Constance Fenimore Woolson became one of the first northern observers to linger in the defeated states from Virginia to Florida. This volume's sixteen essays are intent on illuminating, through her example, the neglected world of Reconstruction's backwaters in literary developments that were politically charged and genuinely unpredictable.

Since its inception in the early 1830s, southern frontier humour (also known as the humor of the Old Southwest) has had enduring appeal. The onset of the new millennium precipitated an impressive rejuvenation of scholarly interest. Southern Frontier Humor represents the next step in this revival, providing a series of essays with fresh perspectives and contexts.

Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass, as well as the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, Ronda C. Henry Anthony examines how women's bodies are used in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power.

Presents the first full-length biography of Charles S. Johnson (1893-1956). Although he called himself a "sidelines activist", his advocacy for racial equality was never watered-down or half-hearted. His strategy was to work indirectly, sometimes behind the scenes, to influence public policy and to mobilize groups with special concerns, especially black sharecroppers.

Olden times take on a nostalgic glow in these "pen pictures" of early days in Northeast Mississippi. The chivalry, the tall tales, the Indian lore, the social customs, and the local characters portrayed here provide intimate descriptions of how people lived in Lee and Itawamba counties during antebellum times and during Reconstruction.

Offers the first comprehensive study of John Edgar Wideman and his novels, and shows him to be a writer emerging as a major figure in black and American literature. It shows him too as a writer whose progress has been to move away from such modernist masters as Eliot, Faulkner, and Joyce into the rich world of black culture, while retaining modernist techniques.

It is well known that New Orleans has its dark underside as well as its glowing visible delights. The journey that Julia Garrett, an intelligent, attractive, but psychically driven girl, makes through the city's hidden labyrinth shapes the movement of this riveting novel.

Four-time winner at the Cannes Film Festival, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan began his career while still at the University of Toronto. The interviewscollected here reveal Egoyan's unique themes, and his individual, independent approach to filmmaking. He discusses his development as a director, his interest in opera and museum installations, and the expectations he has for his audience.

As a key force in the "Africanizing" of American culture, the black middle class has been both a shaper and a mirror during the past three decades. This study of that era shows that the fruits of integration have been at once sweet and bitter. This history of a pivotal group in American society will cause reflection, discussion, and debate.

As a cultural critic, biographer, essayist, and novelist, Albert Murray has had a wide-ranging and profound influence on American art in the decades since the Second World War. Yet this is the first book devoted to Murray himself. It brings together twenty interviews with Murray conducted over the last twenty-four years, concluding with a previously unpublished interview with the editor.

In the pages of this putative autobiography the author poses as a slave for the purpose of bringing attention to the injustice of slavery. The actual author Mattie Griffith, passing as a black, wanted her book to horrify and shame the nation. Pseudo-slave narratives like Griffith's appeared over the course of the abolitionist movement, and this is the only one now in print.

This study is an intertextual examination of selected self-writings by Lillian Smith, Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Zora Neale Hurston. Here their memoirs are placed within a context of southern feminism and the more inclusive discourse of modern American liberalism.

Larry Brown is noted for his subjects - rural life, poverty, war, and the working class - and his spare, gritty style. Larry Brown and the Blue-Collar South considers the writer's full body of work, placing it in the contexts of southern literature, Mississippi writing, and literary work about the working class.

Examines popular culture's reliance on long-standing stereotypes of black men as animalistic, hypersexual, dangerous criminals, whose bodies, dress, actions, attitudes, and language both repel and attract white audiences.

By the spring of 1969, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had reached its zenith as the largest, most radical movement of white youth in American history-a genuine New Left. Yet less than a year later, SDS splintered into warring factions and ceased to exist. A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed traces these activists in their relation to other movements.

Offers a history of the instrument from America's late Victorian period to the Jazz Age. The narrative traces America's BMG (banjo, mandolin, and guitar) community, a late nineteenth-century musical and commercial movement dedicated to introducing these instruments into America's elite musical establishments.

Collects Noel Polk's essays from the late-1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the centre of the South's literary heritage, the volume asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis.

Examines local Black Panther activities throughout the US. These essays shed new light on the Black Panther Party, re-evaluating its legacy in American cultural and political history. Just as important, this volume gives voice to those unsung Panthers whose valiant efforts have heretofore gone unnoticed, unheard, or ignored.

Examines folklore collections compiled by British colonial administrators, military men, missionaries, and women in the British colonies of Africa, Asia, and Australia between 1860 and 1950. Naithani analyzes the role of folklore scholarship in the construction of colonial cultural politics as well as in the conception of international folklore studies.