Bøger udgivet af University Press of Mississippi

"Cole Porter (1891-1964) remains one of America's most popular composer-songwriters, known for the many urbane, witty, romantic songs he wrote for stage musicals and Hollywood films. Porter was unique among his contemporaries for writing both the music and lyrics for his compositions. To this day, several of his numbers-"Night and Day," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "You're the Top," and "I Get a Kick Out of You," to name a few-endure as standards. In The Musicals of Cole Porter: Broadway, Hollywood, Television, Bernard F. Dick presents a critical study of Porter's Broadway and movie musicals, and his one foray into live television, Aladdin-covering the period from his first failure, See America First (1916), to the moderately successful Silk Stockings (1955), which ended his Broadway career. Taking a chronological approach, interspersed with chapters on Porter's "list songs" that owe much to such operas as Mozart's Don Giovanni and Rossini's The Barber of Seville; his love songs, often bittersweet and bleakly poignant; and, above all, his love of figurative language, Dick discusses in detail the various literary sources and cultural reference points that inspired the lyrics to Porter's numbers. The first volume of its kind exclusively dedicated to exploring the extensive body of work by this influential twentieth-century songwriter, The Musicals of Cole Porter is a compelling resource for students and scholars interested in the craft of a great composer-lyricist"--

An engaging collection of original scholarship on LGBTQ+ children's picture books

An engaging collection of original scholarship on LGBTQ+ children's picture books

"Committed to developing frameworks for defining and evaluating Black poetry, literary scholar Stephen E. Henderson (1925-1997) examined the question: What makes a poem Black? In his critical approach, Henderson prioritized form but not at the expense of source, function, or context, and, in so doing, developed convincing theoretical frameworks for examining African American lyric expressions, especially that of Black Arts poets. Black Saturation: Selected Works of Stephen E. Henderson is designed to expand and enrich understandings of Henderson's critical corpus by showcasing many of his most essential essays, presentations, and syllabi in a standalone volume. Henderson deftly conceptualized the ways in which aesthetic innovations were interwoven with revolutionary exigencies--a marriage of poetry and politics that became a hallmark of the 1960s and '70s. While other critics often ignored or fumbled to construct an adequate rubric for evaluating and celebrating Black Arts poetry--penned by Amiri Baraka, Carolyn Rodgers, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Mari Evans, Sarah Webster Fabio, Haki Madhubuti, and Larry Neal, among many others--Henderson constellated a triad of interdependent characteristics (structure, theme, and saturation) through which he examined Black literature in general and poetry in particular. Revisiting Henderson's scholarship in the third decade of the twenty-first century allows us, on the one hand, to further appreciate his imprint on current scholarship about Black literature, especially poetry, and, on the other, to introduce contemporary students and scholars to his salient theoretical frameworks, not to mention his persuasive critical style"--

"Rainbow Fleur de Lis: Essays on Queer New Orleans History is an anthology of eighty-five short, easy-to-read essays that originally appeared in Ambush Magazine and French Quarter Journal. Author Frank Perez has collected essays on a wide variety of topics in LGBTQ history and arranged them into multiple sections. Each section contains five essays and begins with a brief introductory overview that ties the individual pieces together. The book opens with Gay Carnival and provides a unique glimpse behind the scenes of this distinct New Orleans tradition. "Bars and Gay Spaces" examines the ever-shifting queer centers of gravity throughout the French Quarter. The section on the AIDS epidemic demonstrates how, by the end of the 1980s, New Orleans was a model city for providing AIDS-related services. "Arts and Letters" highlights figures such as lesbian photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston and playwright Tennessee Williams. The next section looks at homophobia in New Orleans in the 1950s. "Activists and Activism" traces the birth and rise of queer activism in New Orleans. Historical surveys of several organizations are then provided, followed by a unit on the Up Stairs Lounge fire. A section on Southern Decadence follows before the book turns its attention to how gay men saved the French Quarter a hundred years ago. Several legendary entertainers are then featured, as is the history of Pride in New Orleans. The book closes with a section on historical scholarship and several interview transcripts. Altogether, these essays provide an invaluable resource on New Orleans LGBTQ history"--

Collected interviews with the screenwriter of the Academy Award-winning film American Beauty and creator of the Emmy Award-winning television series Six Feet Under and True Blood

Interviews with the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Body and Soul and the director of Force of Evil and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here

Conversations with the author of They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf, and the American Book award-winning So Long, See You Tomorrow

Interviews with the author of the on-going column "Real Life Top Ten"

Interviews with the Polish filmmaker who garnered international acclaim (including an Oscar nomination) for his Three Colors trilogy of films and was proclaimed one of Europe's most important filmmakers by many critics

Interviews with the director of Dont Look Back, The War Room, and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Collected interviews with the British director of such films as Welcome to Sarajevo, Butterfly Kiss, and The Killer Inside Me

Interviews with one of the great early film directors, maestro of The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and Hearts of the World

Interviews with the director of such films as Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, Verboten!, and Pickup on South Street

Collected interviews with the British director of such films as Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting, and 28 Days Later

In Contested Kingdom: Fan Attachment and Corporate Control at Disneyland, William McCarthy presents a groundbreaking study centered on the history of Disneyland and Disney theme park enthusiasts. Focusing on two unexplored yet interconnected phenomena--the dynamic relationship between the Disney corporation and Southern Californian fans in both online and physical park settings over a span of more than three decades--this volume sheds new light on the meaning and purpose of Disneyland. Through a comprehensive analysis of the interwoven dimensions of individuals, place, and cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes, McCarthy explores the fervent sense of place attachment experienced by the approximately one million annual passholders who visit the park. McCarthy's analysis extends beyond the physical world of Disneyland by delving into the evolution of Disney fandom, discourse, commerce, and social formations in online social platforms like Usenet, web discussion boards, and social media. By employing a mixed-methods approach incorporating interviews, participant observation, surveys, and data analysis, this study establishes a novel analytical framework for comprehending the interrelationships between the Disney corporation, its fan communities, and online social platforms. As the first in-depth longitudinal analysis of the ongoing struggle on successive social platforms between fan users and a corporate entity, Contested Kingdom will also provide valuable insights for scholars and future investigations.

The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social critique in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature for children and adults. Through a range of texts, including James Baldwin's Little Man, Little Man, Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, and more, Amanda M. Greenwell focuses on children and their literal acts of looking. Detailing how these acts of looking direct the reader, she posits that the sightlines of children serve as signals to renegotiate hegemonic ideologies of race, ethnicity, creed, class, and gender. In her analysis, Greenwell shows how acts of looking constitute a flexible and effective narrative strategy, capable of operating across multiple points of view, focalizations, audiences, and forms. Weaving together scholarship on the US child, visual culture studies, narrative theory, and other critical traditions, The Child Gaze explores the ways in which child acts of looking compel readers to look at and with a child character, whose gaze encourages critiques of privileged visions of national identity. Chapters investigate how child acts of looking allow texts to redraw circles of inclusion around the locus of the child gaze and mobilize childhood as a site of resistance. The powerful child gaze can thus disrupt dominant scripts of power, widening the lens through which belonging in the US can be understood.

Despite Hollywood's recent efforts to appeal to more racially diverse audiences, mainstream movies routinely present a limited view of nonwhites generally, and Black women specifically, in stark contrast to the broadly developed spectrum of white characters. Black women characters are frequently rendered invisible, and even in films featuring their image, Black women characters too often fall prey to historically stereotypical patterns. These consistently marginalized Black female images serve to reflect and reinforce messages of racial imbalance distributed worldwide. In Double Crossed: Black Female Intersectionality in Hollywood, author Frederick W. Gooding Jr. chronicles the Black female experience through the lens of Hollywood. Gooding begins by contextualizing the origins of early Black female imagery onscreen, largely restricted to the domestic mammy figure, then traces how these images have shifted over time. Through close readings of such films as Gone with the Wind, Bringing Down the House, The Princess and the Frog, and The Help, as well as case studies looking at Oprah Winfrey and Shonda Rhimes, Gooding considers not only the image the Black woman creates, but also the shadow she casts. In other words, he argues, these consistent patterns of racial imagery reflect and reinforce messages of racial imbalance distributed worldwide. Overall, the volume demonstrates the historical, economic, and social consequences of Hollywood's distorted representation of Black women onscreen and in real life.

Between 1937 and 1940 fieldworkers in the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project interviewed around 3,500 formerly enslaved people in North America, resulting in roughly 20,000 pages of still unedited and inadequately indexed typescript. These accounts--the WPA ex-slave narratives--are the most substantial collection by far of folklore and oral history gathered directly from enslaved people in America. It is arguably the single greatest body of African American folklore extant, and a significant portion is devoted to folk music and song. This book considers this treasure trove in all its relevant social, cultural, and historical contexts. Nineteenth-century Black folk music developed against the backdrop of North American slavery, the American Civil War, Emancipation, the Federal occupation of the South, and a successful white supremacist paramilitary and political insurgency that led to Federal withdrawal, officially sanctioned racial terror, and Southern apartheid. The WPA ex-slave narratives describe that history in remarkable detail. Despite their inestimable value, most of the ex-slave narratives remained unpublished until the late 1970s, being almost unknown except to folklorists. Even after publication, the collection's sheer size was a barrier. Quoting extensively from the narratives and exhaustively annotated and indexed, this volume provides readers with detailed explanations and full references for every musical item or tradition featured in the ex-slave narratives. John Minton covers instrumental music and social dancing, spirituals and hymns, singing games and lullabies, ring plays and reels, worksongs, minstrel songs, ballads, war songs, slavery laments, and much, much more. Written for both specialists and general readers, with 134 illustrations, the book also offers a general overview of the ex-slave narratives, their contents, creation, and relation to the field of African American folklore as a whole.

Merchant-Ivory: Interviews gathers together, for the first time, interviews made over the past five decades with director James Ivory (b. 1928), producer Ismail Merchant (1936-2005), and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (b. 1927). Beginning with their earliest work in India, and ending with James Ivory's last film, The City of Your Final Destination (2009), the book traces their career, while offering valuable insights into their creative filmmaking process. The volume serves as a corrective to the prevailing critical orthodoxy attached to Merchant-Ivory's work, which tends to regard them as being solely concerned with historically accurate costumes and settings. As independent filmmakers, they have developed an idiosyncratic approach that resists facile classification. Merchant-Ivory have insisted on maintaining their independence. More importantly, this book shows how Merchant-Ivory have always taken considerable care in casting their films, as well as treating actors with respect. This is a deliberate policy, designed to bring out one of the triumvirate's principal thematic concerns, running throughout their work-the impact of the "e;clash of cultures"e; on individuals. Partly this has been inspired by their collective experiences of living and working in different cultures. They do not offer any answers to this issue; rather they believe that their task is simply to raise awareness; to make filmgoers conscious of the importance of cultural sensitivities that assume paramount significance in any exchange, whether verbal or nonverbal.

In contemporary Western society, childhood appears more protected than ever to the casual onlooker. Yet, we are increasingly fascinated by narratives in which children are depicted as unsettling beings, both dangerous and endangered, sometimes chaotic or even evil. In Grotesque Progeny: The Commodification of Dangerous and Endangered Children, author Mark Heimermann argues that these representations reflect cultural anxiety regarding a shifting conception of youths from emotional assets to economic ones. In the early to mid-twentieth century, children, who had previously been viewed in part as economic investments, were largely moved out of the work force. For decades, children were instead valued primarily as emotional assets. However, the rise of neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s, and its eventual proliferation throughout our politics and our lives, has led to the widespread commodification of social arenas previously kept separate from the capitalist quest for profit. Not even children have escaped being objectified and dehumanized in this manner. Heimermann examines a variety of texts that center on children and adolescents who are marked as different from the adult characters and consequently viewed as grotesque. Chapters cover Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth, M. R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, Richard Starkings's Elephantmen, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and more. Because the young characters are not viewed as equal members of society, they must either strike back at those who commodify them or risk facing a lifetime of dehumanization. Grotesque Progeny argues that these monstrous depictions reveal societal unease over shortsighted economic and political thinking, the exploitation of children, and the changing nature of childhood. The book addresses a growing concern over which spaces ought to be excluded or removed from the harsh valuations of neoliberalism.

Booker "Bukka" White (1905-1977) was one of the most important blues musicians of the twentieth century. The twelve songs he recorded in Chicago in 1940 are considered to be among the finest in country blues. In The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White: Recalling the Blues, David W. Johnson traces the trajectory of White's life from his early years in Chickasaw and Grenada Counties, Mississippi, through his imprisonment in the notorious Mississippi State Penal Farm in the late 1930s, to making a new life for himself in Memphis, Tennessee. For years only a name on old 78 records--and believed by some to be dead--White was "rediscovered" by John Fahey and ED Denson in the summer of 1963. He went on to have a productive second career, playing venues and festivals throughout the United States and in Canada, and touring Europe and Great Britain with the American Folk Blues Festival. In 1975, he was invited to Bremen, Germany, for a solo concert that was released as his final album. In July 1976, the author interviewed White shortly before his discharge from a Massachusetts hospital where he was recovering from a stroke. After spending eight days in the intensive care unit and three weeks in rehabilitation, White was ready to talk about his life. Recalling stories of "slavery time," White told the author, ". . . some of the [formerly enslaved] guys were wise enough to hold that in their head where they could tell a young pants, where it would go down in history, you know. Just like you doing that now--something happen to you, somebody else will carry that on." The product of years of research, The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White is the first full-length biography of this remarkable country blues performer. Interviewing those who knew White, including his second cousin B.B. King, Johnson has written a detailed and sometimes surprising account of how a young Black man born in the first decade of the twentieth century--the grandson of a slave--found a way to rise above his circumstances and maintain a decades-long career as a musician.

The southern climate, with its heat, oppressive humidity, and stagnant marshland, accentuated disease and suffering for inhabitants of the Old South, from its early settling through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Vicious illnesses--from malaria and yellow fever to dysentery, cholera, typhoid fever, typhus, and smallpox--beleaguered those dwelling in the South and was blamed on the particular combination of air, earth, and water characteristic of those southern territories. As the rhetoric of southern sectionalism blossomed in the early nineteenth century, so did a growing feeling of southern distinctiveness in health issues. Sickly Vapors: Disease and Doctoring in the Old South is an examination of the unique circumstances of health and disease that shaped southern living and culture before, during, and after the Civil War. Through archival records, contemporary anecdotes, and scientific literature, Thomas Helling, MD, explores the intricacies of health and healthcare for an agrarian population which, by virtue of its location, was inordinately vulnerable to sicknesses and epidemics. With the influx of enslaved Africans, a new set of healthcare issues were introduced. Given the region's peculiar climate, ethnic makeup, and customs, southern doctors adopted an attitude of distinctiveness themselves. As a result, southern medical progress became increasingly isolated from northern colleagues. The destructiveness of the Civil War finally provided the impetus for true integration with northern practices in the rapidly changing science of medicine and surgery. Yet, with the regeneration of a medical elitism in postbellum years, southern doctors clung to nostalgic notions of southern culture and southern medical distinctiveness. In this compelling volume, Helling explains how the predominant mindset of southern particularity guided regional interpretation of illness, therapeutic decisions, and medical education, foreboding a healthcare system embedded, still, with institutional racism.