Books published by University Press of Mississippi

Proposes new positions on O'Connor's narration and on the role of the grotesque in her characterization. By investigating the nature of religious experience in her works, Marshall Bruce Gentry concludes that O'Connor's primary interest is redemption achieved by grotesque and unconscious means.

These collected interviews, like a visit with Percy at his home on the Bogue Falaya River, provide refreshing close-up encounters with one of America's most celebrated writers. The interviews cover a period of twenty-two years, from the time of the publication of Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, in 1961, until 1983.

The Civil Rights Movement warrants continuing and extensive examination. The six papers in this collection, each supplemented by a follow-up assessment, contribute to a clearer perception of what caused and motivated the movement, of how it functioned, of the changes that occurred within it, and of its accomplishments and shortcomings.

Printed from a previously unpublished manuscript in the British Library, this is the earliest known account in English of Muskhogean society. It chronicles a remarkable diplomatic episode in Colonial Indian-white relations.

William Faulkner claimed that it may be necessary for a writer to "rob his mother", should the need arise. This study of Faulkner's paradoxical attitude toward women, particularly mothers, will stimulate debate and concern, for his novels are shown here to have presented them as both a source and a threat to being and to language.

Leander Perez (1891-1969) was more than simply another Neanderthal segregationist. He was a political boss who held absolute power in Plaquemines Parish to an extent unsurpassed by any parish leader in Louisiana's history. Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta is his full history.

Unlocks the door to one of the most unusual and diverse regions in America, the culturally, strategically, and agriculturally rich Delta flatland embraced by two rivers, the Mississippi and the Yazoo. It is a land that has produced the best cotton, the Blues, celebrated personages, and a style of living like that nowhere else.

Tells the story of an extraordinary school in the piney woods of Mississippi and of the enduring people of Piney Woods Community who forged on against incredible odds to make a better world for themselves and their children.

Originally published in 1969, Li'l Abner: A Study in American Satire was the first full-length book devoted to a single American comic strip. It has remained a model of how the comics, sometimes snubbed as "culture for the common man", can be given earnest and well deserved analytical attention.

These collected interviews, like a visit with Percy at his home on the Bogue Falaya River, provide refreshing close-up encounters with one of America's most celebrated writers. The interviews cover a period of twenty-two years, from the time of the publication of Percy's first novel in 1961, until 1983.

Explores the resonant intertextual relationship between the fiction of William Faulkner and that of Toni Morrison. Although the two writers are separated by a generation as well as by differences of race, gender, and regional origin, this close critical examination of the creative dialogue between their oeuvres is both timely and appropriate.

This is a collection of interviews, beginning in 1974, with Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrison describes herself as an African-American writer, and these essays show her to be an artist whose creativity is intimately linked with her African-American experience.

This collection of Raymond Carver's interviews reveals him to have been perhaps the premier short-story writer of his generation, a lyric-narrative poet of singular resonance, and a staunch proponent of realistic fiction in the wake of postmodern formalism.

Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, the most prominent writers of Native American descent, collaborate on all their works. In these interviews, conducted both separately and jointly, they discuss how their writing moves from conception to completion and how their novels have been enhanced by both their artistic and matrimonial union.

Selected from more than 140 interviews Gardner has granted, this collection presents a wealth of information on the life and art of one of America's foremost novelists. These interviews show him as a novelist, a charismatic teacher of creative writing, and a widely published scholar.

The fictional characters of Porgy, Bess, Black Maria, Sportin' Life, and the other Gullah denizens of Catfish Row have attained a mythic status. This novel is the story of Porgy, a crippled street-beggar in the black tenement. Unwashed and un-wanted, he lives just on the edge of subsistence and trusts his fate to the gods and chance.

These ten essays from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1989 at the University of Mississippi, explore the religious themes in William Faulkner's fiction. The papers published here conclude that the key to religious meaning in Faulkner may be that his texts focus not so much on God but on a human aspiration of the divine.

Research and interviews spice this delightful book that details the relationship between crawfish and humans - from antiquity to the New York markets of the 1880s; from Depression-era pauper's feast to gourmet entree of the 1980s Cajun cooking craze; from spring afternoon pastime to modern aquaculture agribusiness.

In this collection of interviews spanning 1953 to 1991, Saul Bellow speaks with his interviewers of the changing role of fiction, the literary establishment, and the place of literature in modern life. Since no definitive biography of Bellow has yet been written, these interviews provide valuable insights into this pre-eminent American novelist.

However alien William Faulkner professed popular culture to be to his conception of art and taste, his works are imbued with its inescapable influence. The relationship between Faulkner, a novelist not known for public accessibility, and the culture of the masses makes this an exceptional volume indeed.

In this collection of essays marking the tricentennial of Rene-Robert Cavelier de La Salle's 1682 expedition into the Lower Mississippi Valley, thirteen scholars from a variety of disciplines assess his legacy and the significance of French colonialism in the Southeast.

Explores the complex relationship between ordinary life and outlandish but oft-told legends. What Bill Ellis finds is startling. In multiple case studies legends become part of life. Officials take action in answer to each story's weird details, and people adjust their behaviour to avoid or to experience aliens and ghosts.

Robert Coles is a psychiatrist with a novelist's sensibilities. "Of course everything I come up with," he says, "novelists have known beforehand." These twenty-three interviews disclose not only an illustrious physician trained in paediatrics and psychoanalysis but also a sage whose compassion for children and suffering seems boundless.

These twenty-five interviews with Joyce Carol Oates from early in her career to the present are the first such collection to be published. In conversations from sources as diverse as major news magazines and small scholarly journals, Oates candidly talks about her work, her concepts of literature, her methods of writing, and many other topics.

With increasing candor and openness May Sarton's conversations have given an intimate view of her honest, courageous inner life. Best known to her many readers as a novelist and keeper of journals, Sarton sees herself pre-eminently as a poet. In the interviews collected here she speaks forthrightly about herself, her independence, and her writing.

I this collection of interviews, remarkable man who has been called America's twentieth-century Mark Twain and who was one of the great talkers of his time, expresses his opinions on just about everything and recounts stories and anecdotes about his life which provided the basis for much of his humour writing.

Shelby Foote once said that he did not know of anything he had learned about the writing of novels that couldn't also be applied to the writing of history. In this collection, he expresses penetrating and often humorous remarks about major modern writers as well as about the classical writers of fiction, plays, poetry, and historical narrative.

A collection of twenty-one unabridged interviews that puts us immediately in the company of one of the presiding literary figures of our times. This revered editor, poet, literary historian, and critic encapsulates seven decades of American literature in these conversations that took place between 1942 and 1985.