Books published by University Press of Mississippi

Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright began their careers as marginals within marginalized groups, and their desire to live peacefully in unorthodox marriages led them away from America and into permanent exile in France. Still the obvious differences between them-in class, ethnic and racial origins, and in artistic expression-beg the question: What was there to talk about?

Presents Susan Ketchin's discerning interviews with twelve southerners living and writing in the South. Along with a piece of fiction by each are her penetrating commentaries about the impact of southern religious experience on their work.

From more than a hundred autobiographical accounts written by American Indians recalling their schooling in government and missionary institutions this book recovers a perspective that was almost lost.

In novel after award-winning novel, Don DeLillo exhibits his deep distrust of language and the way it can conceal as much as it reveals. Not surprisingly, DeLillo he interviews with the same care and caution. For years, he shunned them altogether, but despite claims by interviewers about his elusiveness, he now hides in plain sight.

In Tallulah, first published in 1952 and a New York Times bestseller, Tallulah Bankhead's literary voice is as lively and forthright as her public persona. She details her childhood and adolescence, discusses her dedication to the theater, and presents amusing anecdotes about her life in Hollywood, New York, and London.

In 1952, Faulkner noted the exceptional nature of the South when he characterized it as "the only really authentic region in the United States, because a deep indestructible bond still exists between man and his environment." The essays in this volume explore Faulkner's environmental imagination, seeking what Ann Fisher-Wirth calls the "ecological counter-melody" of his texts.

Before Groucho Marx and W.C. Fields American comedy was innocent. After they left their hilarious smudges on the genre, comedy was anything but. Here in a captivating book comparing and contrasting these two premier American comics is the history of how flimflam came to prevail as a major comic form.

For more than 150 years readers have interpreted Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction in a dazzling variety of ways. Instead of arguing in favor of or against what these readers conceive the fiction to mean, this examination of Hawthorne's narrative strategies demonstrates how he leads readers to reason as they do.

Published in paperback for the first time, A Business Career is the story of Stella Merwin, a white woman entering the working-class world to discover the truth behind her upper-class father's financial failure. A "New Woman" of the 1890s, Stella joins a stenographer's office and uncovers a life-altering secret that allows her to regain her status and wealth.

Uproariously funny and filled with choice narration, The Big Ballad Jamboree is Donald Davidson's only novel. He set his story - the romance of hillbilly and country singer Danny MacGregor with folk singer and ballad scholar Cissy Timberlake - in the fictional western North Carolina town of Carolina City during the summer of 1949.

Insights into a rediscovered author's revealing portraits of New England women

Colonizers imposed Christianity and biblical codes on their subjects. In the waning of imperialism, newly emerging peoples employed these same biblical codes as their cries for freedom and justice. These essays expose this tool of oppression as a tool of justice in works from Latin American, Native American, African, and Middle Eastern authors.

This probing look at capital punishment in execution novels and in real-life media accents the poles of punitive power. Such a comparison of literary works with confrontational journalism and court records also brings revealing insight into the long-term debate on capital punishment in American culture.

Richard Wright, the Mississippi-born black writer, saw himself as "an outsider between two cultures," a man searching. In these twelve essays, Michel Fabre follows Wright's search in an investigation of the novelist's life and career. Not originally intended as a collection, these essays underscore Wright's literary and intellectual development.

A history of the Magnolia State's notorious watchdog agency established for maintaining racial segregation

Based on the correspondence of missionaries in the field, this book offers valuable insight unto understanding Protestant attitudes toward the American Indians in the nineteenth century. The book portrays a major Protestant denomination's evangelical program to take the Indian from heathenism to gospel light.

Drawing on research in social movement theory and protest music, Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control traces the history and rise of reggae and the story of how an island nation commandeered the music to fashion an image and entice tourists.

Collects interviews with some of the most influential poets of the last fifty years. The conversations return continually to the serious matter of poetic craft, especially the potential power of form in poetry. These well-paced conversations showcase poets discussing their creative lives with insight and candour.

Since the 1960s, William Faulkner, Mississippi's most famous author, has been recognised as a central figure of international modernism. In eleven essays from the 1999 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, Faulkner and Postmodernism examines William Faulkner and his fiction in light of postmodern literature, culture, and theory.

Today recognised as a major innovator of American fiction, Charles W. Chesnutt is an important contributor to de-romanticizing trends in post-Civil War Southern literature, and a singular voice among turn-of-the-century realists who wrote about race in American life. Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt is the first study to focus exclusively on Chesnutt's novels.

Studies the meaning of interracial romance, love, and sex in the ten years after World War II. Lubin's study suggests that we cannot fully understand contemporary debates about "hybridity," or mixed-race identity, without first comprehending how WWII changed the terrain.

A study of a crucial period in the life of American jazz and popular music. Pearl Harbor Jazz analyses the changes in the world of the professional musician brought about both by the outbreak of World War II and by long-term changes in the music business, in popular taste and in American society itself.

The critique of white male society that Charles W. Chesnutt launched in A Marrow of Tradition continues in this novel, one of six manuscripts left unpublished when this highly regarded African American innovator died. Set in Boston society, on a deserted Caribbean island, and in Brazil, Evelyn's Husband is the story of two men in love with the same young woman.

Questions about the cultural interaction between whites and enslaved blacks in the antebellum South have long aroused controversy. The essays collected in this volume attempt to give answers and conclusions and to bring the picture of cultural life in the antebellum South into clearer focus.

These original essays address a cluster of related problems of enduring fascination for all those who wish to understand the ever-changing, ever-abiding American South. Offering new answers to important questions, they address the Second World War as a major watershed in southern history.

Race has shaped public education in the Magnolia State, from Reconstruction through the Carter Administration. Charles C. Bolton mines newspaper accounts, interviews, journals, archival records, legal and financial documents, and other sources to uncover the complex story of one of Mississippi's most significant and vexing issues.