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In this companion volume to William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, Cleanth Brooks takes an in-depth look at Faulkner's early poetry and prose as well as his five non-Yoknapatawpha novels -- Soldiers Pay, Mosquitoes, Pylon, The Wild Palms, and A Fable. Brooks also offers relevant clarification of some of his earlier interpretations of Faulkner that have been challenged -- most notably in the case of Faulkner that have been challenged -- most notable in the case of Absalom, Absalom!, which he considers Faulkner's greatest novel. Recognizing that the creative and imaginative center of Faulkner's art is Yoknapatawpha County, Brooks examines the merits of each of the works set beyond these boundaries and explores how these writings complement Faulkner as an artist. He sheds light on the literary sources that influenced Faulkner's early work and the technical innovations and general themes Faulkner was to develop in his later writing. The notes and appendixes with which Brooks concludes Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond serve only to amplify this comprehensive study.

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-Dixon Line, Trudier Harris explores why black writers have consistently both loved and hated the South.

For sixty years Daniel Hoffman has drawn on a lifetime of experiences to engage readers with his powerful imagination. The poems in Next to Last Words - illuminated by the poet's unique vision and leavened by touches of humour - continue this tradition.

Documents a number of lawsuits challenging various requirements - including literacy tests, poll taxes, and white primaries - designed primarily to strip African American men of their right to vote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In this riveting narrative, Seymour Topping chronicles his extraordinary experiences covering the East-West struggle in Asia and Eastern Europe from1946 into the 1980s, taking us beyond conventional historical accounts to provide a fresh, first-hand perspective on American triumphs and defeats during the Cold War era.

Argues that the language of William Faulkner's fiction is replete with the voiced conflicts that shaped America and the South from the 1920s to 1950. Specifically, Charles Hannon takes five contemporary debates - in historiography, law, labour, ethnography, and film - and relates them both to canonical and less-discussed texts of Faulkner.

In Catherine Carter's The Swamp Monster at Home, classical sirens sing from a Chesapeake Bay island; Adam and his lover, Steve, share beers in Eden; and a Norse goddess strides into an emergency room, "glowing like grain." With quirky imagination and wry humor, Carter exposes the connections between human and nonhuman, blood and home. Building from The Memory of Gills, Carter's debut collection and winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, these vivid and tender poems consider the immanent and sometimes animistic natural world. The Swamp Monster at Home, however, takes new risks, offering a deeper vulnerability and greater maturity; this new collection acknowledges the loves within and outside of marriage and confesses to both the grief and relief of miscarriage. Varied in form, The Swamp Monster at Home offers accessible and rewarding, elegiac yet hopeful poems -- an exciting new collection from a remarkable writer.

Vaudeville in the Dark is R. M. Ryan's dance to the music of our times, his search for salvation in poetry. In writing up our minor moments, he reckons to find "peace beneath the unsteady light / where we give ourselves to the world / as we circle in and out of the dark." Sometimes funny, sometimes somber, the world of Vaudeville in the Dark ranges from an elegy on the death of a miner in Sago, West Virginia, to a meditation on the life of Rembrandt. Tony the Tiger, Glenn Gould, Chaucer---each has a moment as Ryan makes his way across the stage of our lives. He creates a world both frightening and funny as we -- songsters all -- long for a "heart dissolved in melody."

Meeting a local woman at a service project in Appalachia, the narrator of Mike Carson's poem "Muse" hears from her "Those words, iron twang of loss," that "cut soft ideas of beauty out." Carson's lean, spare collection The Keeper's Voice unflinchingly engages those hard ideas of beauty, of goodness.Direct and often colloquial in their language and traditional in their forms -- blank verse, quatrains, sonnets -- the poems' voices arise from a wide range of viewpoints and situations: from an altar boy thawing a frozen gate lock while early Mass goes on without him, to a returning Vietnam veteran who takes up bull riding; from a boy calling cows in the pre-dawn dark, to a narrator providing instructions for teaching crows to talk; from a new cop, a Christian who must shoot to kill in a ghetto bar, to a family discovering the ashes of a stillborn child among a dead sister's belongings. One poem interweaves locker room slogans with phrases from the Requiem Mass for a friend who died playing football; another centers around a single shout from a wife to her husband threatened by an untethered bull.Refreshingly straightforward, yet suffused with weight, maturity, and passion, The Keeper's Voice projects a wise and uncompromising vision.

These eleven essays confront the ongoing problem of defining American and modern - terms that often travel together as they defy periodisation and other boundaries. Reading questions of nationalism and literature against the grain, contributors address the epistemology and history of literary canonization.

Perhaps America's foremost literary stylist and most mordant wit, H.L. Mencken's most engaging writing told about his own life and experiences. In Mencken on Mencken, S.T. Joshi has assembled a hefty collection of the best of Mencken's autobiographical pieces that have not appeared previously in book form.

The sixteen stories in Margaret Luongo's If the Heart Is Lean etch sharp portraits of people in odd and sometimes surreal situations who thus have the opportunity to view their lives from a unique perspective.

Appointed by Abraham Lincoln to the US Supreme Court during the Civil War, Samuel Freeman Miller served on the highest tribunal for twenty-eight tumultuous years. Michael Ross creates a colourful portrait of a passionate man grappling with the difficult legal issues arising from a time of wrenching social and political change.

The complexities of modern politics and international relationships sometimes overwhelm us. Kenneth Thompson here offers clarity to replace obscurity, personal warmth and human values to replace abstractions. His aim is to introduce the ideas of eighteen "men of large and capacious thought" about twentieth-century international relations.

There were thousands of southerners who travelled extensively in the North and who recorded their impressions in letters, articles for the local press, and books. In A Southern Odyssey, John Hope Franklin canvasses the entire field of southern travel and analyses the travellers and their accounts of what they saw in the North.

Deeply researched and deeply felt, this is a poetic reimagining of the first encounters of Europeans and Tahitians during the historic voyages of Captain James Cook. Examining both imperialism and exploration, Holmes illuminates the cultural exchanges, clashes, miscommunications, and friendships that developed during these European sojourns.

Relying most heavily on music and metaphor, syntax and diction, Two Rooms explores the conflicting claims of life and art, world and word, cultural heritage and cultural affinities, through the sacral, erotic, and creative imagination. By the light of these dark lyrics, Constance Merritt searches for a path, a sign, a respite -- perhaps love or death or God or insight, perhaps radical transformation or a simple good night's sleep. In these poems, by turns passionate, sinuous, playful and grave, a deep and abiding trust in "the plain sense of things" and intractable longing for the "lush, desire-transfigured world" meet and wrestle to a dynamic draw

Gayle Graham Yates's hometown sits on the banks of the Chickasawhay River. Like any place, Shubuta (population 650) is inhabited by good people and bad, by virtue and vice. Both a literary memoir and a cultural history, this book chronicles Yates's return to the town in which she first knew goodness and came to recognize immorality.

Employs a comprehensive approach supported by provocative groundbreaking research to explain the difficulties of the past and suggest considerations for the future of Louisiana's Florida Parishes. The book will stand as a model for the emerging field of southern subregional studies.

Born in rural Virginia during Reconstruction, Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was a central figure in black history and an important American scholar. This important intellectual biography reveals the complex and dedicated individual Woodson was and the lasting significance of his pioneering work in black history.

Offers sharp-witted, deeply felt, and skillfully structured poems. With clear and powerful imagery, these poems reveal an urgent need to rethink the way we interact with each other and the planet. Touching on racism, environmental exploitation, and failed diplomacy, Closson Buck relies on the ability of poetry to enter otherwise hidden territories.

In James Brasfield's Ledger of Crossroads, layered by light and shadow, the crossroads emerge from distinct yet inseparable geographies. Grounded in the sensual world, the poems fuse American and Eastern European landscapes.

Now revised and expanded, this work revisits Cane River's 'forgotten people' and incorporates new findings and insight gleaned across thirty-five years of further research to provide a nuanced portrayal of the lives of Creole slaves and the roles allowed to freed people of colour, tackling race, gender, and slave holding by former slaves.

Winner of the L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award Gifted with a unique and elemental style that goes to the heart of things, often with Zenlike simplicity, Mark Perlberg published four books of poetry over the course of his long and accomplished life. At the time of his death in 2008 he was in the process of putting together Theater of Memory, a collection of his best poems, both published and unpublished, which he saw as the summation of his life's work. His wife, Anna Nessy Perlberg, completed the manuscript and contributed an afterword to the collection. Moving and unpretentious, the poems range from verses about the poet's childhood, including the early death of his father, to pieces in conversation with Chinese poet T'ao Ch'ien, to poignant poems about his grandson. A slowly deflating helium balloon becomes a meditation on aging and the urgency to teach his grandson "to remember in perilous / times to keep something of himself for himself."

In this unique work, twelve prominent Kate Chopin scholars reflect on their parts in the Kate Chopin revival and its impact on their careers. A generation ago, against powerful odds, many of them staked their reputations on the belief - now fully validated - that Chopin is one of America's essential writers.

In 1957, Congress voted to set up the Civil War Centennial Commission. A federally funded agency, the commission's charge was to oversee preparations to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the central event in the Republic's history. Robert Cook recounts the planning, organisation, and ultimate failure of this controversial event.