Books published by University Press of Mississippi

Ed Yoder's exploration of the centrality of history in our lives blends an experienced journalist's zest for current trends with a lifelong interest in American and European history. In this book of linked essays, he argues that history, far from being a dry accumulation of facts, is a fascinating inquiry into "transformations".

The essays in this collection range from the impact of technology on the British folksong revival to regional characteristics of early rock and roll in New Orleans. Attention is given to the blues, Sacred Harp singing, ethnic music, both black and white gospel, country music, and the polka.

An inspired, natural genius, Hank Williams was the complete country balladeer. Although the fascinating trail of Williams's career has been a favourite subject for biographers, Hank Williams, So Lonesome winnows away the myths and hearsay while recounting this Alabama boy's blazing rise to stardom.

Jesus and the Sweet Pilgrim Baptist Church is a fable. No one is claiming that Jesus might come again as a well-dressed Jewish woman. So, put aside your prejudices and read it. The Gospel is here in all its simple, shining power.

Offers perspective on contemporary country music's stars, promoters, and fans. The book probes deeply to learn how a vibrant country music culture evolved from rustic radio programs to become aggressive promotion of recording artists and an extended network of performers and fans unparalleled in other forms of popular music.

Brings together for the first time twenty of the best of Mary Wilkins Freeman's "lost" tales. The book contributes to the growing reevaluation of this exceptional author of such often anthologized stories as "The'Revolt' of Mother" and "A New England Nun".

This collection of essays, reviews, speeches, and interviews details the interaction among a number of Southwestern women writers, including Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O'Connor, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Josephine Humphreys.

In this classic work of Mississippi history, Nollie W. Hickman relates the felling of great forests of longleaf pine in a southern state where lumbering became a mighty industry. While the author's purpose is to share the history of a natural resource, he also gives the reader the panorama of Mississippi.

Although she is eminent primarily as the prize-winning author of classic works of fiction, Eudora Welty is notable also as an astute literary critic. This collection of her book reviews manifests the connecting of her penetrating eye with her responsive intellect in forming sympathetic judgments of the books she reviewed.

Applying aspects of psychoanalytic theory that pertain to identity formation, specifically Rene Girard's theory of the scapegoat, Cultural Orphans in America examines the orphan trope in early American texts and the antebellum nineteenth-century American novel as a reaction to social upheaval and internal tensions.

A new paradigm for perceiving the Vietnam War and the literature it produced This groundbreaking analysis of Vietnam War fiction, poetry, and drama offers far-ranging implications for studies in cultural criticism of that era. It explodes cherished myths and offers an alternative perspective to the one generally espoused by writers and critics who spotlight the issues of the American involvement in Vietnam. Most, subscribing to the myth that Vietnam was unique, toil to give logic to it and strive for sense and order. Yet they reach no satisfactory outcome. Instead of the myth, as this engrossing study argues, we should accept the Vietnam War's non-sense, its illogic, and the mandates of absurdity as the fundamental elements that govern our perceptions of the war. This study sees that America's credos of battle were hinged to imperialism and the drive to rid the world of Communism, cultural confusion, and disorder. The myth is typified by a national vision of needless waste and healing restoration. The works of many writers reflect the accepted myth. Others, such as the authors featured in this study, articulate the contours of non-sense. Stephen Wright, Michael Herr, Tim O'Brien, Peter Straub, Bill Ehrhart, John Balaban, Walter McDonald, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bruce Weigl, D. F. Brown, Emily Mann, David Rabe, Amlin Gray, Arthur Kopit, and Steve Tesich embrace the unreality and the mayhem as natural to the circumstance. Their works, giving voice to an anarchical world, emulate the fighting strategies and tactics of the Vietcong and call for a kind of thinking that considers the jungle and the darkness a friend.Donald Ringnalda (deceased) was a professor of English at the University of St. Thomas.

Explores the actual words and rhetorical choices made by some of the most progressive Protestant white, African-American, and Native American thinkers of the era. The argues that American Protestantism was both prohibitive and constitutive, offering its followers an expedient, acceptable but limited means for assuming social and political power.

These interviews begin with conversations about the highly autobiographical Mean Streets (1973), which first brought Martin Scorsese serious attention, and end with conversations about Kundun, an overtly political biography of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, released in early 1998.

Byron Patton "Pat" Harrison was chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance during the New Deal, and under his tutelage the committee handled many of the major measures of the decade. This study focuses on Pat Harrison's relationships with major New Deal figures.

Chronicles the successful struggle of Douglas Conner to escape poverty and to provide advancement not only for himself but also for impoverished and oppressed blacks in his home state of Mississippi. In this poignant autobiography Conner tells of having to overcome the code that taught that blackness and subordination were interchangeable.

Collected conversations with the masterful Southern storyteller

What measures can parents and advocates take to insure that people who have mental retardation live full, rewarding lives from infancy to old age?Understanding Mental Retardation explores a diverse group of disorders from their biological roots to the everyday challenges faced by this special population and their families.

Drawn from his letters, notebooks, memoirs, and his fiction, this account of Chester Hime's varied, episodic life attempts to trace the origins of his significant literary gift. It details his socioeconomic, familial, and cultural background, and is the bittersweet story of a man who found salvation in writing.

In this collection of candid interviews, Ishmael Reed discusses how critics, especially from the northeastern establishment have consistently marginalized African American writers. As he does in his writing, Reed uses invective, satire, and humour to show how those people "have made no attempt to understand recent American writing."

Although the definitive history of the Southern literary renaissance has yet to be written, its leading figure, without question, was William Faulkner. Helping to define and describe this startling literary phenomenon and Faulkner's place in it are papers of eight noted scholars included in this collection.

Will the South rise again - this time cinematically? The answer to this question is among the subjects considered in this collection of essays. These essays, which introduce a vast subject, were included in the Spring/Summer 1981 issue of The Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South.

Focusing on the state of Arkansas as typical in the role of ecclesiastical activism, Johnny Williams argues that black religion from the period of slavery through the era of segregation provided theological resources that motivated and sustained preachers and parishioners battling racial oppression.

The essays in this volume are indicative of the scope of international scholarship concerning the works of William Faulkner. They reflect the distinctive and somewhat varying views that scholars have of the Nobel Prize author. The nine papers included, a sampling of those delivered at the First International Colloquium on William Faulkner, articulate the relationship between Faulkner and idealism.

During World War I, in the period of the Red Scare, and throughout the Great Depression, the US army's domestic spy agency mounted an extensive surveillance campaign focused on civilians and groups deemed subversive. Negative Intelligence traces the fascinating and astonishing story of military espionage on the home front.