Böcker utgivna av University Press of Mississippi

Sheds light on the paradoxical part the South played in the process of drafting and adopting the Bill of Rights. In cogent, six noted experts in legal, constitutional, and southern history fill a gap in the literature of southern legal history for the period 1787-1791.

For nearly thirty years and through the tenure of five editors-in-chief, Nash K. Burger was on the editorial staff of the New York Times Book Review. In this engaging reminiscence, he explores the route that took him to that bastion of the book world. Burger is a natural raconteur whose ease with the word enhances this appealing narrative.

The argument posed in this analysis is that the poetic excesses of several major female poets, excesses that have been typically regarded as flaws in their work, are strategies for escaping the inhibiting and sometimes inimical conventions too often imposed on women writers. The forms of excess vary with each poet, but by conceiving of poetic excess in relation to literary decorum, this study establishes a shared motivation for such a strategy.Literary decorum is one instrument a culture employs to constrain its writers. Perhaps it is the most effective because it is the least definable. The excesses discussed here, like the criteria of decorum against which they are perceived, cannot be itemized as an immutable set of traits. Though decorum and excess shift over time and in different cultures, their relationship to one another remains strikingly stable. Thus, nineteenth-century standards for women's writing and late twentieth-century standards bear almost no relation. Emily Dickinson's do not anticipate Gertrude Stein's or Sylvia Plath's or Jayne Cortez's or Ntozake Shange's. Yet the charges of indecorousness leveled at these women poets repeat a fixed set of abstract grievances. Dickinson, Stein, Plath, Cortez, and Shange all engage in a poetics of excess as a means of rejecting the limitations and conventions of "e;female writing"e; that the larger culture imposes on them. In resisting conventions for feminine writing, these poets developed radical new poetries, yet their work was typically criticized or dismissed as excessive. Thus, Dickinson's form is classified as hysterical and her figures tortured. Stein's works are called repetitive and nonsensical. Plath's tone is accused of being at once virulent and confessional, Cortez's poems violent and vulgar, Shange's work vengeful and self-righteous. The publishing history of these poets demonstrates both the opposition to such an aesthetic and the necessity for it. Karen Jackson Ford is a professor in the English department at the University of Oregon.

A new look at the evolution of this frontier society and its unyielding grip on slavery

Women should be seen and not heard." That was a well-known maxim in nineteenth century America. In her new book, Unruly Tongue Martha Cutter says the ten African American and Anglo American women she studied wrote as inside agitators. Over time they created a new theory of language.

In the history of Richard Wright, perhaps more than with other writers, a knowledge of what he actually read, and of what authors he preferred, is essential in explaining his intellectual development. This bibliography of his library and reading serves as a key to understanding the development, philosophies, and aesthetics of this great writer.

Mixes Sigmund Freud with vampires and The Little Mermaid to see what new light psychoanalysis can bring to folklore techniques and forms. Bloody Mary in the Mirror is an expedition into psychoanalytic folklore techniques and constitutes a giant step towards realizing the potential Freud's work promises for folklore studies.

The first two-hundred years of Western civilization in the Americas was a time when fundamental and sometimes catastrophic changes occurred in Native American communities in the South. In this volume, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists provide perspectives on how this era shaped American Indian society for later generations and how it even affects these communities today.

Ed Yoder's exploration of the centrality of history in our lives blends an experienced journalist's zest for current trends with a lifelong interest in American and European history. In this book of linked essays, he argues that history, far from being a dry accumulation of facts, is a fascinating inquiry into "transformations".

The essays in this collection range from the impact of technology on the British folksong revival to regional characteristics of early rock and roll in New Orleans. Attention is given to the blues, Sacred Harp singing, ethnic music, both black and white gospel, country music, and the polka.

An inspired, natural genius, Hank Williams was the complete country balladeer. Although the fascinating trail of Williams's career has been a favourite subject for biographers, Hank Williams, So Lonesome winnows away the myths and hearsay while recounting this Alabama boy's blazing rise to stardom.

Jesus and the Sweet Pilgrim Baptist Church is a fable. No one is claiming that Jesus might come again as a well-dressed Jewish woman. So, put aside your prejudices and read it. The Gospel is here in all its simple, shining power.

Music of Louisiana was at the heart of rock-and-roll in the 1950s. Most fans know that Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the icons, sprang out of Ferriday, Louisiana, in the middle of delta country and that along with Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley he was one of the very first of these "e;white boys playing black music."e; The genre was profoundly influenced by New Orleans, a launch pad for major careers, such as Little Richard's and Fats Domino's. The untold "e;rest of the story"e; is the story of swamp pop, a form of Louisiana music more recognized by its practitioners and their hits than by a definition. What is it? What true rock enthusiasts don't know some of its most important artists? Dale and Grace ("e;I'm leaving It Up to You"e;), Phil Phillips ("e;Sea of Love"e;), Joe Barry ("e;I'm a Fool to Care"e;), Cooke and the Cupcakes ("e;Mathilda"e;), Jimmy Clanton ("e;Just a Dream"e;), Johnny Preston ("e;Runnin' Bear"e;), Rod Bernard ("e;This Should Go on Forever"e;), and Bobby Charles ("e;Later, Alligator"e;)? There were many others just as important within the region. Drawing on more than fifty interviews with swamp pop musicians in South Louisiana and East Texas, Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues finds the roots of this often-overlooked, sometimes-derided sister genre of the wildly popular Cajun and zydeco music. In this first book to be devoted entirely to swamp pop, Shane K. Bernard uncovers the history of this hybrid form invented in the 1950s by teenage Cajuns and black Creoles. They put aside the fiddle and accordion of their parents' traditional French music to learn the electric guitar and bass, saxophone, upright piano, and modern drumming trap sets of big-city rhythm-and-blues. Their new sound interwove country-and-western and rhythm-and-blues with the exciting elements of their rural Cajun and Creole heritage. In the 1950s and 1960s American juke boxes and music charts were studded with swamp pop favorites.

Offers perspective on contemporary country music's stars, promoters, and fans. The book probes deeply to learn how a vibrant country music culture evolved from rustic radio programs to become aggressive promotion of recording artists and an extended network of performers and fans unparalleled in other forms of popular music.

This collection of essays, reviews, speeches, and interviews details the interaction among a number of Southwestern women writers, including Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O'Connor, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Josephine Humphreys.

In this classic work of Mississippi history, Nollie W. Hickman relates the felling of great forests of longleaf pine in a southern state where lumbering became a mighty industry. While the author's purpose is to share the history of a natural resource, he also gives the reader the panorama of Mississippi.

Although she is eminent primarily as the prize-winning author of classic works of fiction, Eudora Welty is notable also as an astute literary critic. This collection of her book reviews manifests the connecting of her penetrating eye with her responsive intellect in forming sympathetic judgments of the books she reviewed.

Applying aspects of psychoanalytic theory that pertain to identity formation, specifically Rene Girard's theory of the scapegoat, Cultural Orphans in America examines the orphan trope in early American texts and the antebellum nineteenth-century American novel as a reaction to social upheaval and internal tensions.

A new paradigm for perceiving the Vietnam War and the literature it produced This groundbreaking analysis of Vietnam War fiction, poetry, and drama offers far-ranging implications for studies in cultural criticism of that era. It explodes cherished myths and offers an alternative perspective to the one generally espoused by writers and critics who spotlight the issues of the American involvement in Vietnam. Most, subscribing to the myth that Vietnam was unique, toil to give logic to it and strive for sense and order. Yet they reach no satisfactory outcome. Instead of the myth, as this engrossing study argues, we should accept the Vietnam War's non-sense, its illogic, and the mandates of absurdity as the fundamental elements that govern our perceptions of the war. This study sees that America's credos of battle were hinged to imperialism and the drive to rid the world of Communism, cultural confusion, and disorder. The myth is typified by a national vision of needless waste and healing restoration. The works of many writers reflect the accepted myth. Others, such as the authors featured in this study, articulate the contours of non-sense. Stephen Wright, Michael Herr, Tim O'Brien, Peter Straub, Bill Ehrhart, John Balaban, Walter McDonald, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bruce Weigl, D. F. Brown, Emily Mann, David Rabe, Amlin Gray, Arthur Kopit, and Steve Tesich embrace the unreality and the mayhem as natural to the circumstance. Their works, giving voice to an anarchical world, emulate the fighting strategies and tactics of the Vietcong and call for a kind of thinking that considers the jungle and the darkness a friend.Donald Ringnalda (deceased) was a professor of English at the University of St. Thomas.

Explores the actual words and rhetorical choices made by some of the most progressive Protestant white, African-American, and Native American thinkers of the era. The argues that American Protestantism was both prohibitive and constitutive, offering its followers an expedient, acceptable but limited means for assuming social and political power.

These interviews begin with conversations about the highly autobiographical Mean Streets (1973), which first brought Martin Scorsese serious attention, and end with conversations about Kundun, an overtly political biography of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, released in early 1998.

Byron Patton "Pat" Harrison was chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance during the New Deal, and under his tutelage the committee handled many of the major measures of the decade. This study focuses on Pat Harrison's relationships with major New Deal figures.

Chronicles the successful struggle of Douglas Conner to escape poverty and to provide advancement not only for himself but also for impoverished and oppressed blacks in his home state of Mississippi. In this poignant autobiography Conner tells of having to overcome the code that taught that blackness and subordination were interchangeable.

Collected conversations with the masterful Southern storyteller

What measures can parents and advocates take to insure that people who have mental retardation live full, rewarding lives from infancy to old age?Understanding Mental Retardation explores a diverse group of disorders from their biological roots to the everyday challenges faced by this special population and their families.