Books published by University Press of Mississippi

Addresses the conflicted meanings associated with the figure of the action heroine as she has evolved in various media forms since the late 1980s. Jeffrey A. Brown discusses this immensely popular character type, the action heroine, as an example of, and challenge to, existing theories about gender as a performance identity.

Anthony Mann (1906-1967) is renowned for his outstanding 1950s westerns starring James Stewart (Winchester '73, The Naked Spur, The Man from Laramie). But there is more to Mann's cinematic universe than those tough Wild West action dramas featuring conflicted and secretive heroes. This brilliant Hollywood craftsman also directed fourteen electrifying crime thrillers between 1942 and 1951, among them such towering achievements in film noir as T-Men, Raw Deal, and Side Street. Mann was as much at home filming dark urban alleys in black-and-white as he was the prairies and mountains in Technicolor, and his protagonists were no less conflicted and secretive than his 1950s cowboys.In these Mann crime thrillers we find powerful stories of sexual obsession (The Great Flamarion), the transforming images of women in wartime and postwar America (Strangers in the Night, Strange Impersonation), exploitation of Mexican immigrants (Border Incident), studies of the criminal mind (He Walked by Night), and Civil War bigotry (The Tall Target). Mann's forceful camera captured such memorable and diverse stars as Erich von Stroheim, Farley Granger, Dennis O'Keefe, Claire Trevor, Richard Basehart, Ricardo Montalbn, Ruby Dee, and Raymond Burr.The Crime Films of Anthony Mann features analysis of rare documents, screenplays, story treatments, and studio memoranda and reveals detailed behind-the-scenes information on preproduction and production on the Mann thrillers. Author Max Alvarez uses rare and newly available sources to explore the creation of these noir masterworks. Along the way, the book exposes secrets and solves mysteries surrounding the mercurial director and his remarkable career, which also included Broadway and early live television.

Carter and Ralph Stanley - the Stanley Brothers - are comparable to Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs as important members of the earliest generation of bluegrass musicians. In this first biography of the brothers, author David W. Johnson documents that Carter (1925-1966) and Ralph (b 1927) were equally important contributors to the tradition of old-time country music.

For more than fifty years, Chicago drummer Jimmi Mayes served as a sideman behind some of the greatest musicians and musical groups in history. Mayes lived through racial segregation, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the integration of rock bands, and the emergence of Motown. This sideman to the stars witnessed music history from the best seat in the house - behind the drum set.

Newslore is folklore that comments on and hinges on knowledge of current events. Russell Frank offers a snapshot of the items of newslore disseminated via the Internet that gained the widest currency around the turn of the millennium. Among the newsmakers lampooned in e-mails and on the Web were the Clintons, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Abraham Polonsky (1910-1999), screenwriter and filmmaker of the mid-twentieth-century Left, recognized his writerly mission to reveal the aspirations of his characters in a material society structured to undermine their hopes. In the process, he ennobled their struggle. This volume examines his life and career.

Listen to This stands out as the first book exclusively dedicated to Davis's watershed 1969 album, Bitches Brew. Victor Svorinich traces its incarnations and inspirations for ten-plus years before its release. The album arrived as the jazz scene waned beneath the rise of rock-and-roll and as Davis (1926-1991) faced large changes in social conditions affecting the African American consciousness. This new climate served as a catalyst for an experiment that many considered a major departure. Davis's new music projected rock-and-roll sensibilities, the experimental essence of 1960s' counterculture, yet also harsh dissonances of African American reality. Many listeners embraced it, while others misunderstood and rejected the concoction. Listen to This is not just the story of Bitches Brew. It reveals much of the legend of Miles Davis-his attitude and will, his grace under pressure, his bands, his relationship to the masses, his business and personal etiquette, and his response to extraordinary social conditions seemingly aligned to bring him down. Svorinich revisits the mystery and skepticism surrounding the album and places it into both a historical and musical context using new interviews, original analysis, recently found recordings, unearthed session data sheets, memoranda, letters, musical transcriptions, scores, and a wealth of other material. Additionally, Listen to This encompasses a thorough examination of producer Teo Macero's archives and Bitches Brew's original session reels in order to provide the only complete day-to-day account of the sessions.

Tracks filmmaker Korine's stunning rise, fall, and rise again through his own evolving voice. Bringing together interviews collected from over two decades, this unique chronicle includes rare interviews unavailable in print for years and an extensive, new conversation recorded at the filmmaker's home in Nashville.

Traces the origins of the 1970s family horror subgenre to certain aspects of American culture and classical Hollywood cinema. Individual chapters examine aspects of the genre, its roots in the Universal horror films of the 1930s, the Val Lewton RKO unit of the 1940s, and the crucial role of Alfred Hitchcock. Subsequent chapters investigate the key works of the 1970s.

Up to now, there has been no complete English-language version of the Russian folktales of A.N. Afanas'ev. This translation is based on L.G. Barag and N.V. Novikov's edition, widely regarded as the authoritative edition. The present edition includes commentaries to each tale as well as its international classification number.

In 1971, French jazz critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli co-wrote Free Jazz/Black Power, a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism. It remains a testimony to the long ignored encounter of radical African American music and French left-wing criticism. Carles and Comolli set out to defend a genre vilified by jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic by exposing the new sound's ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was raging in the early 1970s. The two offered a political and cultural history of black presence in the United States to shed more light on the dubious role played by jazz criticism in racial oppression.This analysis of jazz criticism and its production is astutely self-aware. It critiques the critics, building a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice was virtually unknown. The authors reached radical conclusions--free jazz was a revolutionary reaction against white domination, was the musical counterpart to the Black Power movement, and was a music that demanded a similar political commitment. The impact of this book is difficult to overstate, as it made readers reconsider their response to African American music. In some cases it changed the way musicians thought about and played jazz. Free Jazz / Black Power remains indispensable to the study of the relation of American free jazz to European audiences, critics, and artists. This monumental critique caught the spirit of its time and also realigned that zeitgeist.

In A Vulgar Art Ian Brodie uses a folkloristic approach to stand-up comedy, engaging the discipline's central method of studying interpersonal, artistic communication and performance. Because stand-up comedy is a rather broad category, people who study it often begin by relating it to something they recognize--"e;literature"e; or "e;theatre"e;; "e;editorial"e; or "e;morality"e;--and analyze it accordingly. A Vulgar Art begins with a more fundamental observation: someone is standing in front of a group of people, talking to them directly, and trying to make them laugh. So this book takes the moment of performance as its focus, that stand-up comedy is a collaborative act between the comedian and the audience.Although the form of talk on the stage resembles talk among friends and intimates in social settings, stand-up comedy remains a profession. As such, it requires performance outside of the comedian's own community to gain larger and larger audiences. How do comedians recreate that atmosphere of intimacy in a roomful of strangers? This book regards everything from microphones to clothing and LPs to Twitter as strategies for bridging the spatial, temporal, and socio-cultural distances between the performer and the audience.

Edward "e;Kid"e; Ory (1886-1973) was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. Creole Trombone tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city's hottest band leader. The Ory band featured such future jazz stars as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, and was widely considered New Orleans's top "e;hot"e; band. Ory's career took him from New Orleans to California, where he and his band created the first African American New Orleans jazz recordings ever made. In 1925 he moved to Chicago where he made records with Oliver, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton that captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, "e;Muskrat Ramble,"e; is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, he returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career.Drawing on oral history and Ory's unpublished autobiography, Creole Trombone is a story that is told in large measure by Ory himself. The author reveals Ory's personality to the reader and shares remarkable stories of incredible innovations of the jazz pioneer. The book also features unpublished Ory compositions, photographs, and a selected discography of his most significant recordings.

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) produced a relatively small body of fiction, but she wrote thousands and thousands of letters. The present selection of 135 unexpurgated letters, written to seventy-four different people, begins with a 1916 letter written from a tuberculosis sanatorium in Texas and ends with a 1979 letter dictated to an unnamed nursing-home attendant in Maryland.

Ingmar Bergman holds an undisputed place in the cinematic pantheon. His pictures, including numerous comedies, deal seriously with faith, morality, and mortality. This book begins with an interview from 1957, conducted as Bergman completed his early masterpiece "The Seventh Seal", and ends in 2002 as he was preparing to direct "Saraband".

A study of how ragtime comedies, bands, and minstrel shows brought blues to the masses. It traces the mass popularity of so-called "coon songs" during the early years of rag, to their eventual transformation into the original blues music listened to and loved by millions around the world.

Rogue filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (b. 1968) rocketed to fame with his ultra-low-budget film El Mariachi (1992). In this, the first book devoted to Rodriguez, interviews and articles from 1993 to 2010 reveal a filmmaker passionate about making films on his own terms.

Provides a record of what was once America's pre-eminent form of popular entertainment from the late 1800s through the early 1930s. This title includes entries not only on the entertainers themselves, but also on those who worked behind the scenes, the theatres, genres, and historical terms.

A collection of interviews made with director James Ivory (b 1928), producer Ismail Merchant (1936-2005), and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (b 1927). It traces their career, while offering insights into their creative filmmaking process.

When George A Romero released his first film, "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), he created a genre - the zombie move - with which his name will always be associated. This collection of interviews with the creator of the zombie genre discusses his inspirations, his development as a director, and the evolution of filmmaking.

When Mississippi John Hurt (1892-1966) was "rediscovered" by blues revivalists in 1963, his musicianship and recordings transformed popular notions of prewar country blues. Mississippi John Hurt provides this legendary creator's life story for the first time.

Brings together nearly two dozen essays by major writers and intellectuals who analyzed, embraced, and even attacked comic strips and comic books in the period between the turn of the century and the 1960s. From e. e. cummings to Irving Howe, this volume shows that comics have provided a key battleground in the culture wars for over a century.

Features interviews ranging from 1957 to 1969, covering the breadth of the author's fame and literary output. The collection reveals Kerouac - whether drunk or sober, erudite or infantile, guarded or convivial - as a thoughtful writer and complex thinker who resisted all labels placed on him.

"Earl Hooker's life may tell us a lot about the blues," biographer Sebastian Danchin says, "but it also tells us a great deal about his milieu. This book documents the culture of the ghetto through the example of a central character, someone who is to be regarded as a catalyst of the characteristic traits of his community."

Michael Crichton (1942-2008), one of the world's most successful authors, had many careers - doctor, novelist, film director, screenwriter - but was best known to millions of readers as 'Father of the techno-thriller'. This title brings together interviews and profiles of this author.

One of the most eclectic and distinctive writers currently working in comics, Grant Morrison brings the auteurist sensibility of alternative comics and graphic novels to the popular genres that dominate the American and British comics industries. Marc Singer examines how Morrison uses this fusion of styles to intervene in the major political, aesthetic, and intellectual challenges of our time.

Edited by comics scholar M. Thomas Inge, this volume collects the best interviews with Will Eisner from 1965 to 2004. Taken together, the interviews cover the breadth of Eisner's career with in-depth information about his creation of The Spirit and other well-known comic book characters, his devotion to the educational uses of the comics medium, and his contributions to the graphic novel.

Intellectual, cultural, and film historians have long considered neorealism the founding block of post-World War II Italian cinema. Neorealism, the traditional story goes, was an Italian film style born in the second postwar period. This collection brings together distinguished film scholars and cultural historians to complicate this nation-based approach to the history of neorealism.