Books published by University Press of Mississippi

This is a book about an insurrection in modern America, more particularly, about the social and historical background of that insurrection. It is written by a Mississippian who is a historian, and who, on September 30, 1962, witnessed the long night of riot that exploded on the campus of the University of Mississippi at Oxford.

Raymond Pace Alexander was a prominent black attorney in Philadelphia and a distinguished member of the National Bar Association. Yet his legacy to the civil rights struggle has received little national recognition. Alexander was a major contributor to the northern civil rights struggle and was committed to improving the status of black lawyers. This volume examines his life and work.

Brings together over two decades of interviews and profiles with one of America's most prolific and acclaimed contemporary poets. Yusef Komunyakaa describes his work alternately as "word paintings" and as "music", and his affinity with the visual and aural arts is amply displayed in these conversations. The volume also addresses the diversity and magnitude of Komunyakaa's literary output.

Collects sixteen interviews, conducted over three decades, with the British author. McEwan (b. 1948) discusses his views on authorship, the writing process, and major themes found in his fiction, but he also expands upon his interests in music, film, global politics, the sciences, and the state of literature in contemporary society.

Gathers for the first time interviews with the writer, ranging from 1973 to 2006, including one never before published. This volume offers insights available nowhere else. It reveals succinctly the main currents of his life's work. What emerges is a citizen-writer profoundly affected by cultural crises at home and in the world.

What is it like to lose your front porch to the ocean? To see playgrounds and churches subside and succumb to brackish and rising water? The residents of coastal Louisiana know. In Losing Ground, they communicate the significance of place and environment. They speak with an urgency that exemplifies a fear of losing not just property and familiar surroundings, but their identity as well.

Though a well-regarded physicist Carl Sagan is best-known as a writer of popular nonfiction and science fiction and as the host of the series Cosmos. In interviews and profiles, Sagan discusses with verve a wide variety of topics - the environment, nuclear disarmament, religion, politics, extraterrestrial life, astronomy, physics, robotics.

In this collection the ever-controversial Peter Greenaway discusses his philosophies of film, art, aesthetics, literature, and reality, criticizing and even condemning the standard fare of what he calls Hollywood cinema.

The first comprehensive anthology of American women's humorous writing. The editors have included works by such well-known writers as Dorothy Parker, Phyllis McGinley, and Gertrude Stein, as well as by once-popular but forgotten authors such as Frances Whitcher, Carolyn Wells, Alice Duer Miller, and Florence Guy Seabury.

Showing the undeniable truth that religion has been a powerful force in creating and maintaining southern regional distinctiveness, this volume of essays by leading scholars explores key aspects of southern religious development, concentrating on the dominant evangelical tradition.

On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln gave his Second Inaugural Address, the final great speech of his three- decades public career. This book traces how the speech addresses three critical issues that obsessed him: slavery, race, and religion.

In the 1940s and '50s, Richard Dyer-Bennet (1913-1991) was among the best known and most respected folk singers in America. Paul O. Jenkins tells, for the first time, the story of Dyer-Bennet, often referred to as the "Twentieth-Century Minstrel". He argues Dyer-Bennet helped pave the way for the folk boom of the mid-1950s and early 1960s.

Collects sixteen interviews, conducted over three decades, with the British author. McEwan (b. 1948) discusses his views on authorship, the writing process, and major themes found in his fiction, but he also expands upon his interests in music, film, global politics, the sciences, and the state of literature in contemporary society.

This volume of papers from the Porter M. Fortune Chancellor's Symposium in Southern History questions what was distinctively "southern" about the colonial South. Though this region was a land of diversity and had the kind of provincialism that typified other English colonies during this period, the editors find it nearly impossible to characterize the colonial South as unique.

As William Faulkner himself and the authors of these essays insist, the South is part of the United States and ultimately a part of Western society. Rather than considering Faulkner as an isolated southern oddity who inexplicably wrote important fiction, these authors explore why Faulkner's "Southerness" made him universal.

This collection of interviews with Amiri Baraka, the former LeRoi Jones and a key figure in the worldwide black liberation movement, provides an extraordinary insight not only into African American literature but also into the turmoil and passions of the "black experience" during the second half of the twentieth century.

Readers know that humour abounds in the writings of William Faulkner, but the thousands of articles and hundreds of books about his fiction contain little commentary on Faulknerian humour. To give attention to this subject, numerous aspects of Faulknerian humour were explored at the Eleventh Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Thirteen of the papers are presented in this volume.

This collection of essays about the writings of Eudora Welty reflects a range of Welty criticism. Themes, forms, and stylistic features in her work are given careful consideration by some of the most notable scholars on her work. This edition, selected from the twenty-seven essays published in 1979, retains the breadth of subject and approach that marked the earlier volume.

Argues that the novels of the period 1969-1988 served as a dialogue among women authors and their readers as they attempted to deal with dramatic alterations in attitudes toward career, sexuality, and continued tension between personal autonomy and cultural sexism.

In this persuasive study of culture politics, Richard Nelson examines the concept of confidence and doubt as the cement that holds the US together. He explores confidence in its dual meanings - of trusting faith and of deception, guile, and illusion. His book confirms that US national identity is deeply imbued by both.

From abolition through the years just before the civil rights struggle began, African American women recognized that a mixed-race woman made for a powerful and, at times, very useful figure in the battle for racial justice. The Mulatta and the Politics of Race traces many key instances in which black women have wielded the image of a racially mixed woman to assault the colour line.

Arthur E. Morgan (1878-1975) was a visionary who responded to a very high calling - the building of a perfect community, one based upon the bedrock of morality. This book, the first to explore the career of FDR's Utopian, is a soundly researched historical narrative that details Morgan's career and conflicts.

Offers a new interpretation of the transformation of Anglo-American intellectual and aesthetic culture since 1890. Richard Nelson shows that southern intellectuals confronted head on the tensions Machiavelli observed between power and value, creativity and tradition, and romanticism and realism while seeking a cultural ideal that balances politics and aesthetics.

Since no other book has been written on this subject, Metapop blazes a trail into new territory. The author writes very clearly and gracefully and expresses what could be difficult critical concepts in concise and comprehensible prose free of jargon. He identifies a major characteristic of our culture and provides a definitive guide to the phenomenon.