Books published by University Press of Mississippi

The problem of "the color line", W.E.B. Du Bois's ever-present polemical theme, is at the core of this novel of sensual love, radical politics, and the quest for racial justice. Originally published in 1928, Dark Princess was one of two novels written by Du Bois. Toward the end of his life he ranked it as his favourite of all his works.

At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favourite son, a black high-school quarterback.

Reevaluates Charles Chesnutt's deft manipulation of the "passing" theme to expand understanding of the author's fiction and nonfiction. Nine contributors apply a variety of theories to add richness to readings of Chesnutt's works. Together the essays provide convincing evidence that "passing" is an intricate, essential part of Chesnutt's writing, and that it appears in all the genres he wielded.

The Brazilian berimbau, a musical bow, is most commonly associated with the energetic martial art/dance/game of capoeira. This study explores the berimbau's stature from the 1950s to the present in diverse musical genres including bossa nova, samba-reggae, MPB, electronic dance music, Brazilian art music, and more.

Deeply rooted in the soil and culture of his native Greece, in its history, and in its contemporary political upheavals, Theo Angelopoulos has chosen to make all his films, without exception, at home. This collection of interviews follows his career from his innovative debut in 1971 to his triumph at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998.

The interviews collected here range over the nearly three decades of Clint Eastwood's directorial career. Their emphasis is on practical filmmaking issues and on his philosophy of filmmaking. Nearly half are from British and European sources.

Even though King cited and explicated the Bible in hundreds of speeches and sermons, Martin Luther King's Biblical Epic is the first book to analyze his approach to the Bible and its importance to his rhetoric and persuasiveness. It argues that King challenged dominant Christian supersessionist conceptions of Judaism in favour of a Christianity that affirms Judaism as its wellspring.

This volume of folktales from the Far North of European Russia features seventeen works by five narrators of the Russian tale, all recorded in the twentieth century. The tales, distinguished by their extraordinary length and by the manner in which they were commonly told, appear to have flourished only in the twentieth century and only in Russian Karelia.

Photographs, lumber, airplanes, hand-hewn coffins - in every William Faulkner novel and short story worldly material abounds. The essays in Faulkner and Material Culture provide a fresh understanding of the things Faulkner brought from the world around him to the one he created.

Essays in this volume examine the ways in which a wide variety of stakeholders - community activists, elected officials, artists, and policy administrators - describe, quantify, and understand the unique assets of the region. Contributors question the process of cultural planning by analysing the language employed in decision making.

A collection of 20 interviews with famous southern writers, this volume will mark the 50th anniversary of The Southern Quarterly, one of the oldest scholarly journals dedicated to southern studies. The figures interviewed range from Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams, to a virtual Who's-Who of southern literature in the second half of the twentieth century.

A collection of 20 interviews with famous southern writers, this volume will mark the 50th anniversary of The Southern Quarterly, one of the oldest scholarly journals dedicated to southern studies. The figures interviewed range from Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams, to a virtual Who's-Who of southern literature in the second half of the twentieth century.

The "guerilla" figure - taking the form of the black-leather-clad revolutionary within the Black Panther Party - has become an iconic trope in American popular culture. In this title, Rychetta Watkins uses the guerilla figure as a point of departure and shows how the trope's rhetoric animates discourses of representation and identity in African American and Asian American literature and culture.

Hal Ashby (1929-1988) is considered to be the lost genius of the New Hollywood generation. While his name does not bear the familiarity of, say, Robert Altman or Martin Scorsese, his diverse films are among the best known and most beloved of the era. Hal Ashby: Interviews for the first time brings together the best interviews conducted over the course of Ashby's career.

Lars von Trier is the most intriguing film director to emerge in Denmark since the days of his great mentor in spirit Carl Theodor Dreyer. The conversations in this collection trace his development from image-obsessed formalist to control-shunning game master. Most of these interviews are translated into English for the first time.

According to Pauline Adema, you smell Gilroy, California, before you see it. In Garlic Capital of the World, she examines the role of food and festivals in creating a place brand or marketable identity. The author scrutinizes how Gilroy successfully transformed a negative association with the pungent bulb into a highly successful tourism and marketing campaign.

Explores the role that war played in the life and work of a writer whose career seems forever poised against a backdrop of wars going on or recently ended or in the volatile years between. These essays give illumination to Faulkner's close analysis of war and its consequences as they appear in his work.

Mass media images of the male are central to popular culture. This book analyses a genre known as "performance art monologues" as presented by white heterosexual men. Its focus is stand-up comedians and stage and screen artists, including Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Josh Kornbluth, Wallace Shawn, and Danny Hoch, whose acts portray and investigate power, politics, privilege, and community.

Provides a sweeping overview of the history of gospel music. Powerful and incisive, the book traces contemporary Christianity and Christian music to the sixteenth century and the Protestant Reformation after examining music in the Bible and early church.

Best known for her long-running comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek, illustrated fiction, and graphic novels, the art of Lynda Barry has branched out to incorporate plays, paintings, radio commentary, and lectures. In Lynda Barry, author Susan E. Kirtley examines the artist's career and contributions to the field of comic art and beyond.

If Russell Banks (b. 1940) says he doesn't "think about [his] reader at all when [he's] writing," he clearly enjoys talking with his actual readers. These conversations span a period of over thirty years, from 1976 with the publication of his first novel, Family Life, and his first collection of short stories, to 2008 with The Reserve.

This study of nonfiction written by four of nineteenth-century America's first professional women writers investigates the paradoxes posed by the conflict of their texts with their lives. No previous study has grouped Hale, Beecher, Fern, and Fuller together because each promoted differing political goals. While respecting these differences, this title reveals their strong professional links.

Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933), the first performer elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame, was a folk hero in his own lifetime and has been idolized by fans and emulated by performers ever since. Jimmie Rodgers significantly expands and alters our knowledge of the entertainer's life and career.