Cleanth Brooks may have summarized it best: "New Orleans has become one of the cities of the mind, and is therefore immortal." Its writers make it so. Like Richard S. Kennedy's earlier collection Lite
Challenging traditional criticism, a provocative study of the literature of the Southern Renaissance of the 1940s and 1950s reveals how six writers of the era address issues of sexuality, gender roles
Christina Rossetti is known as the greatest female poet of the Victorian age. By the time of her death in 1898 she had written eleven hundred poems and had published over nine hundred of them. Scholar
In this study, Ruth D. Weston probes the whole of Eudora Welty's work to reveal the writer's close relationship to the gothic tradition. Specifically, Weston shows how Welty employs the theme of enclo
At ease equally in poetry and prose, David Huddle is an immensely talented writer esteemed for his shrewd powers of observation, ear for authentic voices, and ability to set forth painful truth with s
The third and last book culled from the mountain of manuscript Thomas Wolfe left behind, The Hills Beyond “contains some of his best, and certainly his most mature, work” (New York Times Book Review).
We accomplish extraordinary things when we do ordinary things together. This heartfelt and hopeful conviction led LSU professor Marybeth Lima to begin the LSU Community Playground Project as a way to
From 1897 to 1917 the red-light district of Storyville commercialized and even thrived on New Orleans s longstanding reputation for sin and sexual excess. This notorious neighborhood, located just out
Sometimes a fact swings down like a hammer and we are changed. The fact of loss, the fact of desire, and all the wild, unruly facts of history hammer down and sparks fly up. This, then, is a collectio
Half Wild is spiritual biography wound backwards, spiraling into the world rather than out of it. Though it reflects on the paradoxes of our violent times, Mary Rose O'Reilley's collection hangs on to
One of the first women's organizations to "mask" in a Mardi Gras parade, the "Million Dollar Baby Dolls" redefined the New Orleans carnival tradition. Tracing their
Set in the pastoral horse country of Rapidian, Virginia, the stories in Cary Holladay s Horse People chronicle the lives of the Fenton family through the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War
Slavery and American Economic Development is a small book with a big interpretative punch. It is one of those rare books about a familiar subject that manages to seem fresh and new. Charles B. Dew, Jo
New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In The Scary Mason-
Lewis Tappan (1788--1873), founder of the Journal of Commerce and the nation's first credit rating firm, is probably best known for his business accomplishments. His greatest achievement, however, was
Everyone knows which books people buy; they can just look at the best-seller lists. But who knows which books people steal? Who, for that matter, knows that authors ruin the book market by writing too
The Old Southwest flourished between 1830 and 1860, but its brand of humor lives on in the writings of Mark Twain, the novels of William Faulkner, the television series The Beverly Hillbillies, the ma
Ryan Flaherty pays particular attention to linguistic slippages and etymologies as heexamines the persistent difficulties of language and love in his latest collection, What's This, Bombardier? Altern
In this expansive study, Bryan Giemza recovers a neglected subculture and retrieves a missing chapter of Irish Catholic heritage by canvassing the literature of American Irish writers from the U.S. So
