Böcker utgivna av University Press of Mississippi

Presents a wide spectrum of compelling arguments about the role and function of mystery in William Faulkner's fiction. Twelve new essays approach the question of what can be known and what remains a secret in the narratives of the Nobel laureate. Scholars debate whether or not Faulkner's work attempts to solve mysteries or celebrate the enigmas of life and the elusiveness of truth.

A sharecropper, a warrior, and a truth-telling prophet, Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) stands as a powerful symbol not only of the 1960s black freedom movement, but also of the enduring human struggle against oppression. A Voice That Could Stir an Army is a rhetorical biography that tells the story of Hamer's life by focusing on how she employed symbols-- images, words, and even material objects such as the ballot, food, and clothing--to construct persuasive public personae, to influence audiences, and to effect social change. Drawing upon dozens of newly recovered Hamer texts and recent interviews with Hamer's friends, family, and fellow activists, Maegan Parker Brooks moves chronologically through Hamer's life. Brooks recounts Hamer's early influences, her intersection with the black freedom movement, and her rise to prominence at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Brooks also considers Hamer's lesser-known contributions to the fight against poverty and to feminist politics before analyzing how Hamer is remembered posthumously. The book concludes by emphasizing what remains rhetorical about Hamer's biography, using the 2012 statue and museum dedication in Hamer's hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi, to examine the larger social, political, and historiographical implications of her legacy. The sustained consideration of Hamer's wide-ranging use of symbols and the reconstruction of her legacy provided within the pages of A Voice That Could Stir an Army enrich understanding of this key historical figure. This book also demonstrates how rhetorical analysis complements historical reconstruction to explain the dynamics of how social movements actually operate.

A significant body of scholarship examines the production of children's literature by women and minorities, as well as the representation of gender, race, and sexuality. But few scholars have previously analyzed class in children's literature. This definitive collection remedies that by defining and exemplifying historical materialist approaches to children's literature.

Assesses the influence of W.J. Cash and the profound effect of his classic dissection of southern history. Perhaps more than any other historian, Cash revolutionized the interpretation of southern identity. In 1941, when he published The Mind of the South, he exploded the correlated myths of the Cavalier South and the New South and gave historiography a new gauge for examining Dixie.

There have been many books written on great individual players who played in the Negro Leagues and/or integrated the Major Leagues. But Newman and Rosen move beyond hagiography to analyse what happens when a community has its economic footing undermined while simultaneously being called upon to celebrate a larger social progress.

Peter Weir: Interviews is the first volume of interviews to be published on the esteemed Australian director. Although Weir (b. 1944) has acquired a reputation of being guarded about his life and work, these interviews by archivists, journalists, historians, and colleagues reveal him to be a most amiable and forthcoming subject. He talks about "e;the precious desperation of the art, the madness, the willingness to experiment"e; in all his films; the adaptation process from novel to film, when he tells a scriptwriter, "e;I'm going to eat your script; it's going to be part of my blood!"e;; and his self-assessment as "e;merely a jester, with cap and bells, going from court to court."e; He is encouraged, even provoked to tell his own story, from his childhood in a Sydney suburb in the 1950s, to his apprenticeship in the Australian television industry in the 1960s, his preparations to shoot his first features in the early 1970s, his international celebrity in Australia and Hollywood. An extensive new interview details his current plans for a new film. Interviews discuss Weir's diverse and impressive range of work-his earlier films Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously, as well as Academy Award-nominated Witness, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander. This book confirms that the trajectory of Weir's life and work parallels and embodies Australia's own quest to define and express a historical and cultural identity.

Can the study of folklore survive brutal wars and nationalized misappropriations? Does folklore make sense in an age of fearsome technology? These are two of several questions this book addresses with specific and profound reference to the history of folklore studies in Germany. There in the early nineteenth century in the ideological context of romantic nationalism, the works of the Brothers Grimm pioneered the discipline. The sublimation of folklore studies with the nation's political history reached a peak in the 1930s under the Nazi regime. This book takes a full look at what happened to folklore after the end of World War II and the defeat of the Nazis. A special focus on Lutz Rhrich (1923-2006), whose work spans the decades from 1955 to 2006, makes this book a unique window into a monumental reclamation. In 1945 Rhrich returned from the warfront at the age of twenty-three, a wounded amputee. Resuming his education, he published his seminal Mrchen und Wirklichkeit (Folktale and Reality) in 1956. Naithani argues that through this and a huge body of scholarship on folktale, folksong, proverbs, and riddles over the next decades, Rhrich transformed folklore scholarship by critically challenging the legacies of Romanticism and Nazism in German folklore work. Sadhana Naithani's book is the first full-length treatment of this extraordinary German scholar written in English.

Alan Lomax (1915-2002) began working for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in 1936. He recorded such important musicians as Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters, Aunt Molly Jackson, and Jelly Roll Morton. A reading and examination of his letters from 1935 to 1945 reveal someone who led an extremely complex, fascinating, and creative life, mostly as a public employee.

Features interviews with one of the most celebrated science-fiction authors of the last 50 years. This book draws together 23 interviews from a variety of media and sources - print and online journals and fanzines, academic journals, newspapers, blogs, and podcasts.

Offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discussion of material often left out or under-represented in studies focused only on traditional literary material.

From 2003 to 2009 sensational judicial bribery scandals rocked Mississippi's legal system. James R. Crockett details the convoluted schemes that eventually put three judges, six of the attorneys, and the former auditor in federal prison. All of the men involved were successful professionals. The stories involve power, greed, but most of all hubris.

Presents a collection of essays on the debates about origins, authenticity, and identity in folk and blues music. These essays originated in an international conference on the Transatlantic paths of American roots music, out of which emerged common themes and questions of origins and authenticity in folk music, be it black or white, American or British.

Examines the economic and social theories - and their histories - that resulted in the creation and operation of the most aggressive and radical experiments in the United States. Trouble in Goshen chronicles three communitarian experiments, both the administrative details and the struggles and reactions of the clients.

The first ethnomusicological study of the people who created a transnational connection in and through a world music culture

The interviews and conversations contained in this volume derive from four decades of Stanley Kunitz's distinguished career. They touch on aesthetic motifs in his poetry, the roots of his work, his friendships in the sister arts of painting and sculpture, his interactions with Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke, and his comments on a host of poets.

Woody Allen (b. 1935) is one of America's most idiosyncratic filmmakers, with an unparalleled output of nearly one film every year for over three decades. Woody Allen: Interviews collects over twenty-five years of interviews. The book's interviews reveal a serious director, often at odds with his onscreen persona as a lovable, slap-stick loser.

Examines the career, oeuvre, and literary theories of one of the most important Caribbean writers living today. An important addition to Caribbean literary studies, Patrick Chamoiseau is an indispensable work for scholars interested in francophone, Caribbean, and world literatures as well as cultural studies.

Based on new research and combining multiple scholarly approaches, these twelve essays tell new stories about the civil rights movement in the state most resistant to change. These essays introduce numerous new characters and conundrums into civil rights scholarship and advance efforts to study African Americans and whites as interactive agents in the complex stories.

Before the innovative work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied, and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, these folklorists worked within but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream institutions. They often called into question the meaning of the very folklore projects in which they were engaged. Shirley Moody-Turner analyzes this output, along with the contributions of a disparate group of African American authors and scholars. She explores how black authors and folklorists were active participants-rather than passive observers-in conversations about the politics of representing black folklore. Examining literary texts, folklore documents, cultural performances, legal discourse, and political rhetoric, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation demonstrates how folklore studies became a battleground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century. The study is framed by two questions of historical and continuing import. What role have representations of black folklore played in constructing racial identity? And, how have those ideas impacted the way African Americans think about and creatively engage black traditions? Moody-Turner renders established historical facts in a new light and context, taking figures we thought we knew-such as Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, and Paul Laurence Dunbar-and recasting their place in African American intellectual and cultural history.

Here, in his own colourful, slangy words, is the true American Dream saga of a self-proclaimed "film geek". Quentin Tarantino: Interviews, revised and updated with twelve new interviews, is a joy to read cover to cover because its subject has so much interesting and provocative to say about his own movies and about cinema in general, and also about his unusual life.

This is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts, Veronica T. Watson identifies this body of literature as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that she names "the literature of white estrangement".

Global in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, Creolization as Cultural Creativity explores the expressive forms and performances that come into being when cultures encounter one another. Creolization is presented as a powerful marker of identity in the postcolonial Creole societies of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the southwest Indian Ocean region.

A wide-ranging survey of how comics have portrayed southern ways of lifeContributions from Tim Caron, Brannon Costello, Brian Cremins, Conseula Francis, Anthony Dyer Hoefer, M. Thomas Inge, Nicolas Labarre, Alison Mandaville, Gary Richards, Joseph Michael Sommers, Christopher Whitby, and Qiana J. WhittedComics and the U.S. South offers a wide-ranging and long overdue assessment of how life and culture in the United States South is represented in serial comics, graphic novels, newspaper comic strips, and webcomics. Diverting the lens of comics studies from the skyscrapers of Superman's Metropolis or Chris Ware's Chicago to the swamps, back roads, small towns, and cities of the U.S. South, this collection critically examines the pulp genres associated with mainstream comic books alongside independent and alternative comics. Some essays seek to discover what Captain America can reveal about southern regionalism and how slave narratives can help us reread Swamp Thing; others examine how creators such as Walt Kelly (Pogo), Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), and Josh Neufeld (A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge) draw upon the unique formal properties of the comics to question and revise familiar narratives of race, class, and sexuality; and another considers how southern writer Randall Kenan adapted elements of comics form to prose fiction. With essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, Comics and the U.S. South contributes to and also productively reorients the most significant and compelling conversations in both comics scholarship and in southern studies.Brannon Costello, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University and is the editor of Howard Chaykin: Conversations (University Press of Mississippi). Qiana J. Whitted, Columbia, South Carolina, is associate professor of English and African American studies at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of "A God of Justice?": The Problem of Evil in Twentieth-Century Black Literature.

Explores the ways in which William Faulkner's fiction addresses and destabilizes the concept of whiteness in American culture. Collectively, the essays argue that whiteness, as part of the Nobel Laureate's consistent querying of racial dynamics, is a central element. This anthology places Faulkner's oeuvre in the contexts of its contemporary literature and academic trends exploring race and texts.

It is the not-too-distant future, and the rapture has occurred. Every born-again Christian on the planet has, without prior warning, been snatched from the earth to meet Christ in the heavens, while all those without the requisite faith have been left behind to suffer the wrath of the Antichrist as the earth enters into its final days.This is the premise that animates the enormously popular cultural phenomenon that is the Left Behind series of prophecy novels, co-written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and published between 1995 and 2007. But these books are more than fiction: it is the sincere belief of many evangelicals that these events actually will occur--soon. Plotting Apocalypse delves into the world of rapture, prophecy, and tribulation in order to account for the extraordinary cultural salience of these books and the impact of the world they project. Through penetrating readings of the novels, Chapman shows how the series offers a new model of evangelical agency for its readership. The novels teach that although believers are incapable of changing the course of a future that has been preordained by God, they can become empowered by learning to read the prophetic books of the Bible--and the signs of the times--correctly. Reading and interpretation become key indices of agency in the world that Left Behind limns.Plotting Apocalypse reveals the significant cultural work that Left Behind performs in developing a counter-narrative to the passivity and fatalism that can characterize evangelical prophecy belief. Chapman's arguments may bear profound implications for the future of American evangelicalism and its interactions with culture, society, and politics.