Books published by University Press of Mississippi

Explores the myth of America as reflected in its popular music. Beginning with the songs of the Pilgrims and continuing through more than two centuries of history and music, this book gives a close reading of the compositions of songwriters as diverse as William Billings, Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

These collected essays chart the World War I and its cultural contours from new and challenging intellectual vantage points. Contributors contest the long-accepted argument about World War I as the crucible of modern life. Instead, they argue that the war was as much a moment of cultural opportunity as it was the origin for modern society.

In these stimulating papers from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in 1985, feminism and Faulkner studies collide, with beneficial results for each. The disruptive and disturbing characterization of women in Faulkner's fictional world and the influence of actual women in the novelist's life are given attentive study in these papers.

The nine essays in The Press and Race illuminate the broad array of print journalists' responses to the civil rights movement in Mississippi, a state that was one of the US's major civil rights battlegrounds. Three of the journalists covered won Pulitzer prizes and one was the first woman editorial writer to earn that coveted prize.

Argues that such writers as A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, who often saw the world in terms of class struggle, did more to advance the anti-racist politics of African American letters than writers such as Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey, who remained enmeshed in nationalist and racialist discourse.

As Gender and the Southern Body Politic examines literature and art, labour and law, manhood and womanhood, the historians contributing to this volume argue that politics is not limited to the machinations of parties, candidates, and voters. Instead, they suggest that private matters -- family, home, and sexuality -- are integral to the construction of public power.

Defining creolization as a process by which European, African, Amerindian, Asian, and American cultures are amalgamated to form new hybrid cultures, Nicole King uses this process as a means to understand C.L.R. James' work and life. She argues that James articulated his attempt to produce radical discourses with a consistent methodology.

This exciting study of two discrete yet kindred areas gives an affirmative answer. It comes to terms with what many have considered distinct yet fluctuating boundaries that separate and bond southern peoples. These papers from the Chancellor's Symposium at the University of Mississippi in 1998 focus on and examine the strong connections.

Traces a long cultural and literary history of the ways African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, Chicanos, gays, and lesbians have challenged the shape and meaning of so-called white identities.

This book, the first to focus on the integration of the Gulf Coast, is Dr. Gilbert R. Mason's eyewitness account of harrowing episodes that occurred there during the civil rights movement. Newly opened by court order, documents from the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission's secret files enhance this riveting memoir.

The essays in Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction, first presented at the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi, focus on Faulkner's narrative inventiveness, on how Faulkner, like his character Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, relentlessly kept "trying to say".

From slave times to the present the proverb has been a mainstay in African-American communication. This study of African-American proverbs is the first to probe deeply into these meanings and contexts.

Tells of the development and progress of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, beginning with Oliver Hudson Kelley's first activities on behalf of the farmer organisation. This is the first scholarly work devoted to the history of the Grange.

Presents a controversial journalist's experiences while working as editor for African American publications in Chicago.

In this biography of Joseph E. Davis, elder brother of and adviser to Jefferson Davis, award-winning author Janet Sharp Hermann provides a fascinating instrument through which to observe nearly a century of American history, from the Revolution and the War of 1812 through the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Comprehensively examines the demographic growth, cultural evolution, and political involvement of Louisiana's large Acadian community between the time of the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and 1877, the end of Reconstruction in Louisiana, when traditional distinctions between Acadians and neighbouring groups had ceased to be valid.

Known today primarily as the author of Our Town, probably America's most beloved and widely produced play, Thornton Wilder is the only writer ever to be honored with Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and drama. This collection of interviews with Wilder covers the full range of his sixty-year career as one of America's leading men of letters.

Salt water is inundating coastal Louisiana, transforming precious wetlands into backwaters of the Gulf of Mexico. Science may hold the key to reversing the problem. But what will the cost be? And will the plan work? These are the quandaries reported in Saving Louisiana? The Battle for Coastal Wetlands.

Characteristically, William Faulkner minimized his familiarity with the theories of psychology that were current during the years of his apprenticeship as a writer, especially those of Freud. Yet, Faulkner's works prove to be a trove for psychological study. These original papers from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1991 at the University of Mississippi, vary widely in their approaches to recent psychological speculation about Faulkner's texts. In recent years psychological analysis of literature has shifted largely from investigation of a writer's life to a focus on the work itself. Whether applying the theories of Freud and Lacan, drawing upon theoretical work in women's studies and men's studies, or emphasizing the rigid determinacy of psychological pressure, the essays included in this collection show Faulkner's works to be unquestionably rich in psychological materials.

Whether we travel to foreign lands or just across the city, we all journey, and from our journeying we shape ourselves, our history, and the stories we tell. In essays written by some of the most respected contemporary scholars, this anthology brings together some of the best informed convictions about travel.

Musicians and music scholars rightly focus on the sounds of the blues and the stories of blues performers. Inadequately studied until now are the lyrics. The contributors to this book explore this aspect of the blues and establish the significance of African American popular song as a neglected form of oral history.

In 1968, Winthrop D. Jordan published his groundbreaking work White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 and opened up new avenues for thinking about sex, slavery, race, and religion in American culture. Written by former students, these essays are a tribute to the career of one of America's great thinkers.

Grenada experienced much turmoil in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in an armed Marxist revolution, a bloody military coup, and finally in 1983 Operation Urgent Fury, a United States-led invasion. Wendy C. Grenade combines various perspectives to tell a Caribbean story about this revolution, weaving together historical accounts and contemporary analysis.

Called the greatest Civil War historian, Shelby Foote began his career as a novelist whose powerful works of fiction rose out of his closeness to life and culture in his native region, the Mississippi Delta country. This perceptive study fills the genuine need for a sound critical appreciation of Foote the novelist.

That Faulkner was a "liar" not just in his writing but also in his life has troubled many critics. This critical study by one of the most acclaimed international Faulkner scholars takes its cue from Nietzsche's concept of "truth as a mobile army of metaphors" and from Ricoeur's dynamic view of metaphor and treats the wearing of masks not as an ontological issue but as a matter of discourse.

In the early twentieth century, two wealthy white sisters, cousins to a North Carolina governor, wrote identical wills that left their substantial homeplace to a black man and his daughter. Revealing the details of this case and of the lives of the people involved in it, Gene Stowe presents a story that sheds light on and complicates our understanding of the Jim Crow South.

This richly detailed outline of William Faulkner's life is written by an eminent French scholar who brings new insights to the Nobel Laureate's career and writings. This book is intended to be a quick reference guide to Faulkner's works as they relate to his life. Principally an outline of a literary career, it will serve as a useful aid for students beginning a study of Faulkner's novels.

Even before the desegregation of the military and public education and before blacks had full legal access to voting, racial barriers had begun to fall in American sports. This collection of essays shows that for many African Americans it was the world of athletics that first opened an avenue to equality and democratic involvement.

Written by multinational scholars, this collection of essays exploring Richard Wright's travel writings shows how in his hands the genre of travel writing resisted, adapted, or modified the forms and formats practiced by white authors.

This collection of the most significant and illuminating critical essays about the works of Wole Soyinka over the past three decades is evidence of the international esteem he has achieved. Gathered here in this remarkable collection, the essays simultaneously showcase Soyinka's postcolonial politics and his literary aestheticism.