The Bad Poor examines the rise of Grit Lit, a movement in contemporary southern literature written by and about poor southern whites. Examining issues of genre, race, and culture, Mitch Ploskonka traces the emergence of this iconoclastic mode through its major authors to reveal a literary-cultural identity rooted in difference, marked by ......
Rubble Masonry is a collection of lyric essays that takes its title from the practice of stone masons who, rather than using materials cut to ideal measurements, work with found rocks' natural shapes. It combines the rich images and musical language of poetry with prose's capacity to share personal narratives and information from wide-ranging ......
Genealogies of Humor and Satire in Anglo-American Literature, 1711-1856
Comic Belles Lettres presents a significant rethinking of standard categories in scholarship on antebellum American humor-such as Old Southwest humorists and literary comedians-to provide a richer analysis of the comic writers of the period. By introducing an alternative aesthetic category, "comic belles lettres," and placing it in a transnational ......
In Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti presents Nathaniel Hawthorne's spouse on her own terms, situating her remarkable life within its own historical, philosophical, and cultural context, and freeing her from notions that Nathaniel constructed and that his biographers perpetuated. The first of this two-volume work recounts ......
In Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti presents Nathaniel Hawthorne's spouse on her own terms, situating her remarkable life within its own historical, philosophical, and cultural context, and freeing her from notions that Nathaniel constructed and that his biographers perpetuated. The first of this two-volume work recounts ......
Black Southern Women and the Poultry Processing Industry
The poultry processing industry in El Dorado, Arkansas, was an economic powerhouse in the latter half of the twentieth century. It was the largest employer in the interconnected region of South Arkansas and North Louisiana surrounding El Dorado, and the fates of many related companies and farms depended on its continued financial success. We Just ......
Chelsea Whitton's debut poetry collection, Wonder Wheel, dexterously whirls in sonic circles, ruminating on themes of spiritual bestowal and terrestrial bequest, millennial identity, adult friendship, feminine desire, and the mythmaking at stake in family history. Disoriented speakers who nevertheless believe they know where they are going, and ......
The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South
For three years in the early 1900s, a serial killer zigzagged across the rice belt region of the United States, using an everyday ax to slaughter Black families living within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad's Sunset Route. The similarities among the murders were uncanny, yet lawmen in early twentieth-century America had neither the ......
Queer New Orleans and the Story of America's Oldest Gay Bar
Cafe Lafitte in Exile tells the story of queer New Orleans through the lens of its most legendary gay bar. The bar has held a central place in New Orleans's queer scene for many years, with a profuse mythology entwining its history. Cafe Lafitte in Exile endeavors to set the record straight. The story begins long before the founding of gay ......
