Böcker utgivna av University Press of Mississippi

Dark novels, shows, and films targeted toward children and young adults are proliferating wildly. It is even more crucial now to understand the methods by which such texts have traditionally operated and how those methods have been challenged, abandoned, and appropriated. Reading in the Dark fills a gap in criticism devoted to children's popular culture by concentrating on horror.

The eleven essays that make up this volume, including a paper written by the acclaimed novelist William Kennedy, explore the place of "the unbuilt world" in William Faulkner's fiction. They give particular attention to the social, mythic, and economic significance of nature, to the complexity of racial identity, and to the inevitable clash of gender and sexuality.

The book Jazzmen (1939) claimed New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz and introduced the legend of Buddy Bolden as the "e;First Man of Jazz."e; Much of the information that the book relied on came from a highly controversial source: Bunk Johnson. He claimed to have played with Bolden and that together they had pioneered jazz. Johnson made many recordings talking about and playing the music of the Bolden era. These recordings have been treated with skepticism because of doubts about Johnson's credibility. Using oral histories, the Jazzmen interview notes, and unpublished archive material, this book confirms that Bunk Johnson did play with Bolden. This confirmation, in turn, has profound implications for Johnson's recorded legacy in describing the music of the early years of New Orleans jazz. New Orleans jazz was different from ragtime in a number of ways. It was a music that was collectively improvised, and it carried a new tonality--the tonality of the blues. How early jazz musicians improvised together and how the blues became a part of jazz has until now been a mystery. Part of the reason New Orleans jazz developed as it did is that all the prominent jazz pioneers, including Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, and Kid Ory, sang in barbershop (or barroom) quartets. This book describes in both historical and musical terms how the practices of quartet singing were converted to the instruments of a jazz band, and how this, in turn, produced collectively improvised, blues-inflected jazz, that unique sound of New Orleans.

This collection of twenty-one essays takes an interdisciplinary look at the flowering of satire and its influence in defining new roles in black identity. Contributors look at the ways in which contemporary African American satire engages in a broad ranging critique that exposes fraudulent, outdated, absurd, or otherwise damaging mindsets and behaviours.

The Last Lawyer is the true, inside story of how an idealistic legal genius and his diverse band of investigators and fellow attorneys fought to overturn a client's final sentence. Ken Rose has handled more capital appeals cases than almost any other attorney in the United States. The Last Lawyer chronicles Rose's decade-long defense of Bo Jones, a North Carolina farmhand convicted of a 1987 murder. Rose called this his most frustrating case in twenty-five years, and it was one that received scant attention from judges or journalists. The Jones case bares the thorniest issues surrounding capital punishment. Inadequate legal counsel, mental retardation, mental illness, and sketchy witness testimony stymied Jones's original defense. Yet for many years, Rose's advocacy gained no traction, and Bo Jones came within three days of his execution. The book follows Rose through a decade of setbacks and small triumphs as he gradually unearthed the evidence he hoped would save his client's life. At the same time, Rose also single-handedly built a nonprofit law firm that became a major force in the death penalty debate raging across the South. The Last Lawyer offers unprecedented access to the inner workings of a capital defense team. Based on four-and-a half years of behind-the-scenes reporting by a journalism professor and nonfiction author, The Last Lawyer tells the unforgettable story of a lawyer's fight for justice.

No city in America knows how to mark death with more funerary panache than New Orleans. The pageants commemorating departed citizens are often in themselves works of performance art. A grand obituary remains key to this Stygian passage. And no one writes them like New Orleanian John Pope. Collected here are not just simple, mindless recitations of schools and workplaces, marriages, and mourners bereft. These pieces in Getting Off at Elysian Fields are full-blooded life stories with accounts of great achievements, dubious dabblings, unavoidable foibles, relationships gone sour, and happenstances that turn out to be life-changing.To be sure, there are stories about Carnival monarchs, great philanthropists, and a few politicians. But because New Orleans embraces eccentric behavior, there are stories of people who colored way outside the lines. For instance, there was the doctor who used his plasma to make his flowers grow, and the philanthropist who took money she had put aside for a fur coat to underwrite the lawsuit that desegregated Tulane University. A letter carrier everyone loved turned out to have been a spy during World War II, and a fledgling lawyer changed his lifelong thoughts about race when he saw blind people going into a Christmas party through separate doors--one for white people and another for African Americans. Then there was the punctilious judge who got down on his hands and knees to edge his lawn--with scissors.Because New Orleans funerals are distinctive, the author includes accounts of four that he covered, complete with soulful singing and even some dancing. As a popular, local bumper sticker indisputably declares, "e;New Orleans--We Put the Fun in Funeral."e;

The life and times of the Kewpie doll and its fascinating socially conscious creator

Brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars about the comics of Chicago-based cartoonist Chris Ware (b. 1967). This collection addresses the range of Ware's work from his earliest drawings in the 1990s and his acclaimed Jimmy Corrigan, to his most recent works-in-progress, "Building Stories" and "Rusty Brown".

Elizabeth Spencer is captivated by Italy. For her it has been a second home. A one-time resident who returns there, this native-born Mississippian has found Italy to be an enchanting land whose culture lends itself powerfully to her artistic vision. This is a collection of her Italian tales.

As the fastest growing African-based religion in the United States, Santeria has stimulated many publications, but none prior to this book noted the special significance of its art and artists. In Santeria Garments and Altars, two distinguished folklorists and practitioners of the faith focus upon the artistry of garments and altars that are intrinsic to the worship.

From the contentious delay of the first clash in 1901 to the battle in 2009, The Egg Bowl covers the Ole Miss-Mississippi State rivalry in depth. For each game the narrative includes every scoring drive, every player who crossed the goal line, and every final score. More than 150 photos illustrate the intensity of action on the field.

Lying in a hospital bed, Jose P. Ramirez, Jr. (b. 1948) almost lost everything because of a misunderstood disease. Titled for the sliver of a window through which persons with leprosy in medieval times were allowed to view Mass but not participate, Squint tells a story of love and perseverance over incredible odds.

Recounts the life of bluesman Sam Myers (1936-2006), as told in his own words to author Jeff Horton. Throughout the book, Myers provides a historical context to a bygone era of the blues and reveals his own thoughts and feelings about the musicians with whom he played.

Without signing the documents that would permit adoption, young Theresa Cameron's mother placed her little daughter under the aegis of Catholic Charities, and then vanished forever. During the 1960s and 1970s this abandoned, unadoptable child was shuttled through foster homes. Foster Care Odyssey is her candid story.

Argues that Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in the tradition of all great literature, is invaluable for transporting readers to a time, place, and conflict essential to understanding who we are today. Without this work there would be a hole in American history and a blank page in the history of African-Americans.

First published in London in 1939, Minty Alley is now made available again. In the pages of this work C.L.R. James is both an imaginative political theorist and a sensitive commentator on the West Indian social and cultural scene.

Too often Eudora Welty is known to the general public as Miss Welty, a ""perfect lady"" who wrote affectionate portraits of her home region. Yet recent scholarship has amply demonstrated a richer complexity. The essays collected in Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty seek to move Welty beyond a discussion of region and reflect new scholarship that remaps her work onto a larger canvas.

Carlos Saura's movies are frequently ambiguous, sometimes controversial, and always narratively complex. This book collects interviews the filmmaker has given in Spain, France, Germany, and Canada. They represent a treasure trove of comments by Saura on his own work.

Because Seminoles held slaves in a confusing system that was markedly dissimilar to white society's, the federal government was challenged to identify which blacks in Florida were free and which were not. In a preface to this new edition Daniel Littlefield explains the continuing significance of this subject.

James Salter has been known throughout his career as a "writer's writer", acclaimed by such literary greats as Susan Sontag, Richard Ford, John Banville, and Peter Matthiessen for his lyrical prose, his insightful and daring explorations of sex, and his examinations of the inner lives of women and men. Conversations with James Salter collects interviews published from 1972 to 2014.

Prefiguring Postblackness explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American freedom struggle and representations of African American identity staged in five plays between 1959 and 1969 during the civil rights era. Through close readings of the plays, their popular and African American print media reviews, and the cultural context in which they were produced, Carol Bunch Davis shows how these representations complicate narrow ideas of blackness, which often limit the freedom struggle era to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest and cast Malcolm X's black nationalism as undermining the civil rights movement's advances.These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations, ideologies, and iconography of the African American freedom struggle, subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift ideology's tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African American full citizenship. The dramas also reimagine the Black Arts movement's restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of racial identity, and their staged representations construct a counter-narrative to cultural memory of the freedom struggle during that very era. In their use of a "e;postblack ethos"e; to enact African American subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves beyond the struggle.The plays under discussion range from the canonical (Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Amiri Baraka's Dutchman) to celebrated, yet understudied works (Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness, Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope, and Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody). Finally, Davis discusses recent revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama well beyond the decade of their creation.

Essays that explore how patronage and sexism marginalised women artists

Canadian cartoonist Gregory Gallant (b. 1962), pen name Seth, emerged as a cartoonist in the fertile period of the 1980s, when the alternative comics market boomed. These interviews, including one career-spanning, definitive interview between the volume editors and the artist published here for the first time, delve into Seth's output from its earliest days to the present.

Profiles of superstar women athletes and the obstacles they faceEssays by Lisa Doris Alexander, Kathleen A. Bishop, Angela J. Hattery, Lisa R. Neilson, Roberta J. Newman, Elizabeth O'Connell, Martha Reid, C. Oren Renick, Joel Nathan Rosen, Yvonne D. Sims, Earl Smith, Lea Robin Velez, and Kimberly YoungFemale athletes are too often perceived as interlopers in the historically maledominated world of sports. Obstacles specific to women are of particular focus in A Locker Room of Her Own. Race, sexual orientation, and the similar qualities ancillary to gender bear special exploration in how they impact an athlete's story. Central to this volume is the contention that women in their role as inherent outsiders are placed in a unique position even more complicated than the usual experiences of inequality and discord associated with race and sports. The contributors explore and critique the notion that in order to be considered among the pantheon of athletic heroes one cannot deviate from the traditional demographic profile, that of the white male.These essays look specifically and critically at the nature of gender and sexuality within the contested nexus of race, reputation, and sport. The collection explores the reputations of iconic and pioneering sports figures and the cultural and social forces that helped to forge their unique and often problematic legacies. Women athletes discussed in this volume include Babe Didrikson Zaharias; the women of the AAGPBL; Billie Jean King; Venus and Serena Williams; Marion Jones; Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova; Sheryl Swoopes; Florence Griffith Joyner; Roberta Gibb and Kathrine Switzer; and Danica Patrick.David C. Ogden, Pacific Junction, Iowa, is associate professor in the department of communications at University of Nebraska at Omaha. Joel Nathan Rosen, Allentown, Pennsylvania, is associate professor of sociology and Africana studies at Moravian College. They are coeditors of Reconstructing Fame: Sport, Race, and Evolving Reputations and Fame to Infamy: Race, Sport, and the Fall from Grace, both published by the University Press of Mississippi.

The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735 is the story of the Natchez Indians as revealed through accounts of Spanish, English, and French explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and colonists, and in the archaeological record. Because of their strategic location on the Mississippi River, the Natchez Indians played a crucial part in the European struggle for control of the Lower Mississippi Valley. The book begins with the brief confrontation between the Hernando de Soto expedition and the powerful Quigualtam chiefdom, presumed ancestors of the Natchez. In the late seventeenth century Rene-Robert Cavelier de La Salle's expedition met the Natchez and initiated sustained European encroachment, exposing the tribe to sickness and the dangers of the Indian slave trade.The Natchez Indians portrays the way that the Natchez coped with a rapidly changing world, became entangled with the political ambitions of two European superpowers, France and England, and eventually disappeared as a people. The author examines the shifting relationships among the tribe's settlement districts and the settlement districts' relationships with neighboring tribes and with the Europeans. The establishment of a French fort and burgeoning agricultural colony in their midst signaled the beginning of the end for the Natchez people. Barnett has written the most complete and detailed history of the Natchez to date.

The Joker stands out as one of the most recognizable comics characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done to understand supervillains. This is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this villain, illustrating why the Joker appears so relevant to audiences today.