Faculty Publications: Books

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  Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985

  Jay Watson

  Jay Watson argues that southern literary studies has been overidealized and dominated by intellectual history for too long. In Reading for the Body, he calls for the field to be rematerialized and grounded in an awareness of the human body as the site where ideas, including ideas about the U.S. South itself, ultimately happen. Employing theoretical approaches to the body developed by thinkers such as Karl Marx, Colette Guillaumin, Elaine Scarry, and Friedrich Kittler, Watson also draws on histories of bodily representation to mine a century of southern fiction for its insights into problems that have preoccupied the region and nation alike: slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy; the marginalization of women; the impact of modernization; the issue of cultural authority and leadership; and the legacy of the Vietnam War. He focuses on the specific bodily attributes of hand, voice, and blood and the deeply embodied experiences of pain, illness, pregnancy, and war to offer new readings of a distinguished group of literary artists who turned their attention to the South: Mark Twain, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Katherine Anne Porter, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walker Percy. In producing an intensely embodied U.S. literature these writers, Watson argues, were by turns extending and interrogating a centuries-old tradition in U.S. print culture, in which the recalcitrant materiality of the body serves as a trope for the regional alterity of the South. Reading for the Body makes a powerful case for the body as an important methodological resource for a new southern studies.

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  Becoming the Gentleman: British Literature and the Invention of Modern Masculinity, 1660-1815

  Jason Solinger

  Becoming the Gentleman explains why British citizens in the long eighteenth century were haunted by the question of what it meant to be a gentleman. Supplementing recent work on femininity, Solinger identifies a corpus of texts that address masculinity and challenges the notion of a masculine figure that has been regarded as unchanging.

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  American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary

  Deborah Barker and Kathryn B. McKee

  Employing innovations in media studies, southern cultural studies, and approaches to the global South, this collection of essays examines aspects of the southern imaginary in American cinema and offers fresh insight into the evolving field of southern film studies. In their introduction, Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee argue that the southern imaginary in film is not contained by the boundaries of geography and genre; it is not an offshoot or subgenre of mainstream American film but is integral to the history and the development of American cinema. Ranging from the silent era to the present and considering Hollywood movies, documentaries, and independent films, the contributors incorporate the latest scholarship in a range of disciplines. The volume is divided into three sections: "Rereading the South" uses new critical perspectives to reassess classic Hollywood films; "Viewing the Civil Rights South" examines changing approaches to viewing race and class in the post-civil rights era; and "Crossing Borders" considers the influence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and media studies on recent southern films. The contributors to American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary complicate the foundational term "southern," in some places stretching the traditional boundaries of regional identification until they all but disappear and in others limning a persistent and sometimes self-conscious performance of place that intensifies its power.

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  Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature: Power, Anxiety, and Subversion

  Mary Hayes

  A study of medieval attitudes towards the ventriloquism of God's and Christ's voices through human media, which reveals a progression from an orthodox view of divine vocal power to an anxiety over the authority of the priest's voice to a subversive take on the divine voice that foreshadows Protestant devotion.

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  A Biography of the English Language

  C. M. Millward and Mary Hayes

  The third edition of A BIOGRAPHY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE continues to examine the structure of English, from its Indo-European pre-history, through the invasions that shaped Old and Middle English, through its speakers' conscious efforts to police it in the Early Modern period, through its present-day transformations manifest in urban slang and text-messaging. The textbook explores three important issues: how languages and language change are systematic; how the inner history of a language is profoundly affected by its outer history of political and culural events; and how the English of the past has everywhere left its traces on present-day English. By uncovering the language's past, one can better use it to communicate as well as speculate about its future use in ever-changing globalized media.

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  The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U. S. Nationalism

  Leigh Anne Duck

  How could liberalism and apartheid coexist for decades in our country, as they did during the first half of the twentieth century? This study looks at works by such writers as Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison to show how representations of time in southern narrative first accommodated but finally elucidated the relationship between these two political philosophies. Although racial segregation was codified by U.S. law, says Leigh Anne Duck, nationalist discourse downplayed its significance everywhere but in the South, where apartheid was conceded as an immutable aspect of an anachronistic culture. As the nation modernized, the South served as a repository of the country's romantic notions: the region was represented as a close-knit, custom-bound place through which the nation could temper its ambivalence about the upheavals of progress. The Great Depression changed this. Amid economic anxiety and the international rise of fascism, writes Duck, "the trope of the backward South began to comprise an image of what the United States could become." As she moves from the Depression to the nascent years of the civil rights movement to the early cold war era, Duck explains how experimental writers in each of these periods challenged ideas of a monolithically archaic South through innovative representations of time. She situates their narratives amid broad concern regarding national modernization and governance, as manifest in cultural and political debates, sociological studies, and popular film. Although southern modernists' modes and methods varied along this trajectory, their purpose remained focused: to explore the mutually constitutive relationships between social forms considered "southern" and "national."

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  Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture

  Peter P. Reed

  Rogue Performances recovers eighteenth and nineteenth-century American culture's fascination with outcast and rebellious characters. Highwaymen, thieves, beggars, rioting mobs, rebellious slaves, and mutineers dominated the stage in the period's most popular plays. Peter Reed also explores ways these characters helped to popularize theatrical forms such as ballad opera, patriotic spectacle, blackface minstrelsy, and melodrama. Reed shows how both on and offstage, these paradoxically powerful, persistent, and troubling figures reveal the contradictions of class and the force of the disempowered in the American theatrical imagination. Through analysis of both well known and lesser known plays and extensive archival research, this book challenges scholars to re-think their assumptions about the role of class in antebellum American drama.

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  Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner

  Jay Watson

  Forensic Fictions is the first book-length critical study of William Faulkner's fictional depictions of the legal vocation and the practice of law. Examining Faulkner's lawyer characters in light of the southern storytelling tradition, Jay Watson argues that the forensic competence of the Faulknerian lawyer is a direct function of his skill as a raconteur. To trace the biographical and historical roots of Faulkner's lifelong preoccupation with the legal profession, Watson draws on contemporary scholarship in narrative, rhetoric, jurisprudence, legal and intellectual history, literary theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His approach yields insightful readings of forensic characters and scenes from such works as "An Odor of Verbena," The Hamlet, "Wild Palms," Absalom, Absalom! and The Reivers. Watson shows the links between storytelling and the competence of Faulkner's legal characters by examining the intertextual logic that connects the two most important lawyers in the Yoknapatawpha fiction: the incompetent Horace Benbow and the more capable Gavin Stevens, whose entrance into Faulkner's oeuvre coincides with Benbow's untimely departure from it. Focusing on the nine novels in which these two characters appear, Watson traces the evolutionary process by which Stevens supplants Benbow. Three of the Stevens novels--Intruder in the Dust, Knight's Gambit, and Requiem for a Nun--from what Watson calls Faulkner's "forensic trilogy" and, when read together, constitute the writer's most sustained investigation of the rhetorical and ethical responsibilities of the lawyer-citizen. Faulkner, Watson argues, saw the forensic figure as a potential hybrid of homo loquens and homo politicus, capable of combing the roles of storyteller, rhetorician, and theatrical performer with those of critic, citizen, and ethical man. As such, this figure served as a provocative authorial surrogate through whom Faulkner could explore diverse and often contradictory aspects of his personal experience, his family background, his cultural heritage, and, most of all, his own artistic use of language.

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  The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah's Book Club

  Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jaime Harker

  The Oprah Affect explores the cultural impact of Oprah’s Book Club, particularly in light of debates about the definition and purpose of literature in American culture. For the critics collected here, Oprah’s Book Club stands, in the context of American literary history, not as an egregious undermining of who we are and what we represent, as some have maintained, but as the latest manifestation of a tradition that encourages symbiotic relationships between readers and texts. Powered by women writers and readers, novels in this tradition attract crowds, sell well, and make unabashed appeals to emotion. The essays consider the interlocking issues of affect, affinity, accessibility, and activism in the context of this tradition. Juxtaposing book history; reading practices; literary analysis; feminist criticism; and communication, religious, political, and cultural studies; the contributors map a range of possibilities for further research on Oprah’s Book Club.A complete chronological list of Book Club picks is included.

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  Unmentionables

  Beth Ann Fennelly

  With elegant word play and her usual subversive wit, Beth Ann Fennelly questions our everyday human foibles.

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  Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare

  Thomas Hallock and Ivo Kamps

  The essays in this volume interrogate the unique and often problematic relationship between early modern cultural studies and ecocriticism, providing theoretical insights and models for a future practice that successfully wed the two disciplines.

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  Ouida the Phenomenon: Evolving Social, Political, and Gender Concerns in Her Fiction

  Natalie Schroeder and Shari Hodges Holt

  This first full-length study of the works of best-selling Victorian novelist Ouida (Marie Louise Ramé) examines the evolution of social, political, and gender issues in Ouida’s fiction, from her “high society” romances of the 1860s to her satirical exposés of contemporary society in the 1890s. Schroeder and Holt demonstrate the significance of this relatively unexamined author’s works for literary studies today by investigating the ideological connections between Victorian, modern, and postmodern cultures inherent in Ouida’s works, while revealing Ouida’s oeuvre as a complex reflection of Victorian cultural paradoxes. Situating Ouida within the context of central nineteenth-century cultural debates such as the New Woman controversy, the Aesthetes’ discourse in alternative male sexualities, and the aesthetic controversy over popular sensation fiction, Schroeder and Holt likewise examine how Ouida’s concerns anticipate such modern/postmodern issues as the conflict between popular and “high” culture and the development of a consumerist society based on commodity spectacle.

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  Smonk

  Tom Franklin

  It's 1911 and the townsfolk of Old Texas, Alabama, have had enough. Every Saturday night for a year, E. O. Smonk has been destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men, all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over-and-under rifle. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty, and goitered—an expert with explosives and knives—Smonk hates horses, goats, and the Irish, and it's high time he was stopped. But capturing old Smonk won't be easy—and putting him on trial could have shocking and disastrous consequences, considering the terrible secret the citizens of Old Texas are hiding.

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  Journeyman's Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner's Mississippi to post 9/11 New York

  Adam Gussow

  Journeyman’s Road offers a bold new vision of where the blues have been in the course of the twentieth century and what they have become at the dawn of the new millennium: a world music rippling with postmodern contradictions. Author Adam Gussow brings a unique perspective to this exploration. Not just an award-winning scholar and memoirist, he is an accomplished blues harmonica player, a Handy award nominee and veteran of the international club and festival circuit. With this unusual depth of experience, Gussow skillfully places blues literature in dialogue with the music that provokes it, vibrantly articulating a vital American tradition. Journeyman’s Road tells unfamiliar stories about a popular American art form, takes contrarian positions, explodes familiar mythologies, and frames the contemporary blues scene in bold, new ways. Taking its title from Gussow’s self-described status as a “journeyman,”-a musician who has completed his apprenticeship and is well on his way to becoming a master-this new book brings together articles that Gussow wrote for publications such as Blues Access and Harper’s, as well as critical scholarly essays, including the first comprehensive examination of William Faulkner’s relationship with the blues. At the heart of Gussow’s story is his own unlikely yet remarkable streetside partnership with Harlem bluesman Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, a musical collaboration marked not just by a series of polarities-black and white, Mississippi and Princeton, hard-won mastery and youthful apprenticeship-but by creative energies that pushed beyond apparent differences to forge new dialogues and new sounds. Undercutting familiar myths about the down-home sources of blues authenticity, Gussow celebrates New York’s mongrel blues scene: the artists, the jam sessions, the venues, the street performers, and the eccentrics. At once elegiac and forward-looking, Journeyman’s Road offers a collective portrait of the New York subculture struggling with the legacy of 9/11 and healing itself with the blues. Filled with photographs and complete with a comprehensive bibliography, Journeyman’s Road is an expedition through the evolution and culture of the blues, a trip filled with the genre’s characteristic collisions and contradictions, paradoxes and multiplicities, innovative calls and often unexpected responses. Adam Gussow is the rare academic who has lived the life of a bluesman. An accomplished harmonica player, recording artist, and journalist, he is assistant professor of English and southern studies at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition and Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir.

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  Conversations with Larry Brown

  Jay Watson and Larry Brown

  In a fifteen-year period beginning in 1988, Mississippi native Larry Brown (1951-2004) published two collections of short stories, five novels, a memoir, and two collections of essays. Two of his novels, Joe and Father and Son, won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Brown wrote with compassion, humor, and unflinching honesty about the struggles of rural and small-town working-class southerners. Twenty-nine years old when his writing career began, Brown's plainspoken style, sharp eye for detail, and keen ear for dialogue quickly established him as one of the most respected and compelling new voices in contemporary southern literature. Conversations with Larry Brown brings together interviews Brown gave between 1988 and 2004. The collection includes interview material from a full-length film documentary about Brown's life and work as well as two previously unpublished pieces. Across these conversations, Brown offers insights into all of his books and several of his short stories.

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  Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother

  Beth Ann Fennelly

  Beth Ann Fennelly, writing to a newly pregnant friend, goes beyond the nuts and bolts or sentimentality of other parenting literature, in letters that range in tone from serious to sisterly, from lighthearted to downright funny. Some answer specific questions; others muse about the identity shift a woman encounters when she enters Mommyland. This book invites all mothers to join the grand circle of giving and receiving advice about children.

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  Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction

  Annette Trefzer

  How Faulkner, Welty, Lytle, and Gordon reimagined and reconstructed the Native American past in their work. In this book, Annette Trefzer argues that not only have Native Americans played an active role in the construction of the South’s cultural landscape—despite a history of colonization, dispossession, and removal aimed at rendering them invisible—but that their under-examined presence in southern literature also provides a crucial avenue for a post-regional understanding of the American South. William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Andrew Lytle, and Caroline Gordon created works about the Spanish conquest of the New World, the Cherokee frontier during the Revolution, the expansion into the Mississippi Territory, and the slaveholding societies of the American southeast. They wrote 100 years after the forceful removal of Native Americans from the southeast but consistently returned to the idea of an "Indian frontier," each articulating a different vision and discourse about Native Americans—wholesome and pure in the vision of some, symptomatic of hybridity and universality for others. Trefzer contends that these writers engage in a double discourse about the region and nation: fabricating regional identity by invoking the South’s "native" heritage and pointing to issues of national guilt, colonization, westward expansion, and imperialism in a period that saw the US sphere of influence widen dramatically. In both cases, the "Indian" signifies regional and national self-definitions and contributes to the shaping of cultural, racial, and national "others." Trefzer employs the idea of archeology in two senses: quite literally the excavation of artifacts in the South during the New Deal administration of the 1930s (a surfacing of material culture to which each writer responded) and archeology as a method for exploring texts she addresses (literary digs into the textual strata of America’s literature and its cultural history).

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  Tender Hooks: Poems

  Beth Ann Fennelly

  Beth Ann Fennelly is fearless in delineating the joys, absorptions, and yes jealousies of new motherhood. Having studied motherhood "as if for an exam," reality proved "wilder and deeper and funnier" than anything she'd anticipated.Tender Hooks is Fennelly's spirited exploration of parenting, with all its contradictions and complexities.

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  Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies

  Adetayo Alabi

  Telling Our Stories investigates the continuities and divergences in selected Black autobiographies from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The stories of slaves, creative writers, and political activists are discussed both as texts produced by individuals who are products of specific societies and as interconnected books. The book identifies influences of environmental and cultural differences on the texts while it adopts cross-cultural and postcolonial reading approaches to examine the continuities and divergences in them.

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  Measure for Measure: Texts and Contexts

  William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Ivo Kamps, and Karen Raber

  This edition of the Shakespeare play, Measure for Measure features the Bevington edition along with four sets of thematically arranged primary documents and illustrations to help facilitate your ability to view many different approaches to both the play and the early modern culture out of which the play emerged.

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  Conversations with Audre Lorde

  Audre Lorde and Joan Wylie Hall

  Audre Lorde (1934-1992), the author of eleven books of poetry, described herself as a "Black feminist lesbian poet warrior mother," but she added that this phrase was inadequate in capturing her full identity. The interviews in this collection portray the many additional sides of the Harlem-born author and activist. She was also a rebellious child of Caribbean parents, a mastectomy patient, a blue-collar worker, a college professor, a student of African mythology, an experimental autobiographer in her book titled Zami, a critic of imperialism, and a charismatic orator. Despite her intense engagement with the major social movements of her time, Lorde told interviewers that she was always an outsider, a position of weakness and of strength. Most of her schoolmates were white. She married a white legal-aid attorney, and after their divorce she was the partner of a white psychologist for many years. These intimate alliances with whites caused some African Americans of both genders to question the depth of her solidarity. Lorde expressed distrust of some white feminists and charged that they lacked real understanding of African American struggles. Writing proved to be her powerful weapon against injustice. Painfully aware that differences could provoke prejudice and violence, she promoted the bridging of barriers. These interviews reveal the sense of displacement that made Lorde a champion of the outcast and the forgotten--whether in New York, Mississippi, Berlin, or Soweto.

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  Hell at the Breech: A Novel

  Tom Franklin

  In 1897, in the rural southwestern area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered. Seeking retribution, his outraged friends -- mostly poor cotton farmers -- form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe are responsible. The hooded members of this gang wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre, where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty. Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham War are four people: the county's aging sheriff, sympathetic to both sides; the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell-at-the-Breech; a ruthless detective who wages his own private war against the gang; and a young store clerk harboring a terrible secret. Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the dark events of dark days, events that lead the people involved to discover their capacity for good, for evil, or for both. It is a mesmerizing and unforgettable display of talent by a writer of immeasurable gifts.