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 | Publications > Faculty Books
 | | Approach to Teaching Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Other Works
Edited by John Lowe, Modern Language Association, 2009
Zora Neale Hurston emerged as a celebrated writer of the Harlem Renaissance, fell into obscurity toward the end of her life, yet is now recognized as a great American author. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching Godis popular among general readers and is widely taught in universities, colleges, and secondary schools.
"The strength of this volume is that it presents Hurston's work from a variety of perspectives and thus conveys to teachers the richness and complexity of her work--and the critical controversies surrounding it." --Susan Meisenhelder, California State Univ. San Bernardino |
 | | Feel These Words Writing in the Lives of Urban Youth
Susan Weinstein, State University of New York Press, 2009
Feel These Words is the story of nine young people from Chicago -- Jig, Crazy, TeTe, Mekanism, Robbie, Marta, Patricia, Jose, and Dave -- who regularly write poetry and/or song lyrics, but not for school. The Writers, as author Susan Weinstein calls them, are skilled in a variety of literacy-centered discourses through which they develop sophisticated understandings of core rhetorical issues and explore concepts of identity, social positioning, gender roles, and sexuality. |
 | | Theory and the Common From Marx to Badiou
Patrick McGee, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
Using a method that combines analysis, memoir, and polemic, McGee writes experimentally about a series of thinkers who ruptured linguistic and social hierarchies, from Marx, to Gramsci, to Badiou.
"Theory and the Common is a book of extraordinary intellectual and theoretical sophistication, which works as a moving and an erudite discussion of a whole series of key ideas and thinkers in critical theory. McGee has also written a book that is both a heartfelt call for a more egalitarian university system and a passionate account of his own life."--Enda Duffy, Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara |
 | | Louisiana Folklkore Miscellany Volume XVIII 2008
Edited by Carolyn Ware, w/ Corrie Kiesel, assistant editor
The Louisiana Folklore Miscellany is published by the Louisiana Folklore Society, with the assistance of Louisiana State University's Department of English. |
 | | Ms. Mentor's New and Evermore Impeccable Advice for Women and Men in Academia
Emily Toth, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008
From the ivory tower that affords her an unparalleled view of the academic landscape, Ms. Mentor dispenses her perfect wisdom to the huddled masses of professorial newbies, hardbitten oldies, and anxious midcareerists. She gives etiquette lessons to academic couples and the tough-talking low-down on adjunct positions. She tells you what to wear, how to make yourself popular, and how to decode acdemic language. Raw, shocking, precise, clever, absurd -- Ms. Mentor has it all. |
 | | Spalding Gray's America
William W. Demastes, Limelight Editions, 2008
Spalding Gray's America traces Gray's life and work from his days with the Performance and Wooster Groups to his career as a storyteller who presented captivating monologues - including Swimming to Cambodia, Gray's Anatomy, and Monster in a Box - while sitting behind a desk on an otherwise bare stage. Gray's stories make up a quirky, full-color portrait of America. They are poignant, touching, and often troubling, but also vividly insightful and invariably funny. Spalding Gray's America captures the essence of Spalding Gray's theatre and storytelling, revealing the deep but conflicted passion behind his work.
Highly Recommended--Choice |
 | | Hooked on Horror 3
June Pulliam (co-author), Libraries Unlimited, 1999
Hundreds of new horror titles are described and organized according to reading preferences in this new volume of Fonseca and Pulliam's award-winning readers' advisory guide. Focusing on titles published since 2002 and broadly accessible to library users, along with a few older classics, the authors cover more than a dozen popular subgenres of horror fiction, including vampires and werewolves, techno-horror, ghosts and haunted houses, and small town horror. Lively annotations and commentary help you find the right book for your most demanding horror fans. More than 500 annotations are new to this edition. |
 | | From Shane to Kill Bill
Patrick McGee, Wiley-Blackwell, 2006
"McGee has written a rich, ambitious book. ... McGee's readings are richly informed by the work of his predecessors, and they are invariably thoughtful, bold, and challenging. Probably every reader who has seen the films discussed will find things to quarrel with, but almost certainly every reader will also find McGee's arguments a powerful inducement to give these films another careful look. Summing Up: Highly recommended." –CHOICE, September 2007.
"McGee is an astute observer of United States culture who offers trenchant discussion of the Western genre. He chooses his films strategically and reveals their textual strategies and historical meanings." –Stan Corkin, University of Cincinnati. |
 | | Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina
Edited by John W. Lowe, LSU Press, 2008
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson acquired 828,000 square miles of French territory in what became known as the Louisiana Purchase. Although today Louisiana makes up only a small portion of this immense territory, this exceptional state embraces a larger-than-life history and a cultural blend unlike any other in the nation. Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina, a collection of fourteen essays compiled and edited by John Lowe, captures all of the flavor and richness of the state's heritage, illuminating how Louisiana, despite its differences from the rest of the United States, is a microcosm of key national concerns—including regionalism, race, politics, immigration, global connections, folklore, musical traditions, ethnicity, and hybridity. |
 | | Bridging Southern Cultures
Edited by John W. Lowe, LSU Press, 2005
These essays by some of the South's leading historians, anthropologists, literary critics, musicologists, and folklorists provide a multicultural, interdisciplinary panorama of past and contemporary southern society. Using the best of current scholarship, Bridging Southern Cultures demonstrates the new energies revitalizing southern studies. By spanning the chasms of race, gender, class, academic disciplines, art forms, and "high" and popular culture, this exciting collection reaches aspects of southern heritage that previous approaches have obscured for too long. |
 | | Comedy Matters: From Shakespeare to Stoppard
William W. Demastes, Palgrave Macmillan,2008
Comedy Matters traces the long tradition of the expansive comic embrace of cultural difference and diversity that manages to survive even in some of mankind's darkest moments. Demastes argues that comedy has a hard-nosed, pragmatic dimension that can be mobilized against belligerent cultural forces. Drawing from the works of Shakespeare, Stoppard, and a number of other comic masters, Comedy Matters demonstrates how comedy continues to work against cultural regimentation by striving to recalibrate our decision-making processes and challenging the stultifying rigidity of human economy in the broadest sense of the term. |
 | | Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Daniel Novak, Cambridge University Press, 2008
This radically new account of the relationship between photography and literary realism in Victorian Britain draws on detailed readings of photographs, writings about photography, and fiction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde. While other critics have argued that photography defined what would be "real" for literary fiction, Daniel A. Novak demonstrates that photography itself was associated with the unreal--with fiction and the literary imagination. |
 | | Black Hawk
Edited by J. Gerald Kennedy, Penguin Classics,2008
"Life of Black Hawk is a powerful personal account of tragic eloquence, and the introduction by J. Gerald Kennedy provides readers with an emotionally engaging, intelectually compelling orientation to the story of Black Hawk told so well about himself and his people." --Kerry A. Trask, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin Colleges |
 | | Ragged Dicks
James Catano, Southern Illinois University Press, 2001
"Examining narratives of the self-made man from Carnegie to Iacocca, with African American, ethnic, and worker narratives included, this book shows the persuasive powers of [the story of the self-made man] in creating and re-creating masculinity. This book will help articulate the relationship of rhetoric and spychoanalysis beyond the limts of individualism to cultural questions of gender, race, and class."--Suzanne Clark, author of Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West |
 | | Haunted Bones
Chris Tusa, Louisiana Literature Press, 2006
"In Haunted Bones, Chris Tusa probes uncharted waters with courage, with energy, strength and clarity of vision. Microscoping the incorporeal, he holds a magnifying glass up to the mind of a hypochondriac in poems detailing fear of tumors, leukemia, bad weather or the sky falling. Intense and compelling, Haunted Bones is a vivid and hard edged collection. Chris Tusa’s poems cannot be folded and sailed out into the night because like a boomerang in the shape of “Satan’s hipbone,” they return and linger in the recesses of the mind."--Vivian Shipley, author of When There Is No Shore
“Chris Tusa’s poetry is poetry on steroids. Though it’s not for everybody, it’s just fine for people who appreciate good poetry.” --Greg Langley, Baton Rouge Advocate
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 | | Plantation Airs
Brannon Costello, LSU Press, 2007
In Plantation Airs, Brannon Costello argues persuasively for new attention to the often-neglected issue of class in southern literary studies. Focusing on the relationship between racial paternalism and social class in American novels written after World War II, Costello asserts that well into the twentieth century, attitudes and behaviors associated with an idealized version of agrarian antebellum aristocracy--especially, those of racial paternalism--were believed to be essential for white southerners. |
 | | Murmur
Laura Mullen, Futurepoem, 2006
Wildly absorbing, Murmur is a gorgeous genre-bender: detective novel, film noir and memoir (and the autopsy of all three), tricked out with bloody mirrors, blue murder, mutable coffins, loopy interrogations and a dead bombshell's shoes. Laura Mullen floods the confines of the 'detective novel' with all possible events, all murderers and all murdered so that, at any point in the narrative, everything has happened and everyone has done it. Murmur is a further-fiction of displacement and testimony that calls us to the task of deciding not only whether we would or would not do a thing but also whether we even know the difference between the two. A gripping exploration into the brutality of our time that you will not soon forget. |
 | | Hunk City
James Wilcox, Penguin, 2008
In Hunk City, Wilcox takes us to southeast Louisiana, where Burma van Buren, thanks to a recent inheritance, is the wealthiest woman in St. Jude Parish. Still working at a bargain store, Burma is having trouble finding the right charity with which to share her fortune. As she tries to keep hope alive and convert the citizens of Tula Springs to a radical faith-based egalitarian democracy, Burma becomes entangled with a certain Dr. Schine, her landscape designer, though she hasn’t resolved her life-long passion for Mr. Pickens, who up and married a severe evangelical from a neighboring town. Meanwhile, Mr. Harper, Burma’s staunch Republican accountant with eyelashes to die for, works to keep her money out of the hands of the local Democrats. Will Burma find happiness with either Dr. Schine or Mr. Pickens? Will Burma ever find a suitable place for her millions? In Hunk City, James Wilcox brings his unique humorous touch to a topic that sorely needs it. |
 | | What Gets Into Us
Moira Crone, University Press of Mississippi, 2006
In What Gets Into Us, the new collection of short stories by Moira Crone, a curious child discovers that some believe "the gods who made this world didn’t make it right, and they are terribly sorry about it." A nine-year-old girl is the only one who realizes that her mother's mental illness has put the family’s survival at stake. A shy African American woman confronts evil directly in a terrifying act of love. A teenage orphan replaces a wayward son in a privileged but unhappy family. A young carpenter decides that if his baby is going to be born right, he will have to commit a crime, and build the world anew. |
 | | The Portable Edgar Allan Poe
Edited by J. Gerald Kennedy, Penguin Classics, 2006
A fully revised collection of Poe’s work
The first new edition of this landmark anthology since 1945 presents a more complicated, perverse, and culturally engaged Poe. Along with the author’s familiar masterworks in poetry and fiction, this new Portable Poe includes satirical tales that reflect his critique of American culture.
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 | | Rhetorical Women: Roles and Representations
Co-edited by Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, University of Alabama Press, 2005
Women throughout the history of rhetoric have represented themselves as fulfilling roles that range from dependents or enablers of male authority to autonomous agents acting on their own. These essays examine the tactics women have employed in self-representation and the feminist rhetorics that result. |
 | | Anne McCaffrey: A Life With Dragons
Robin Roberts, University Press of Mississippi,2007
Anne McCaffrey: A Life with Dragons is the life story of a writer who vividly depicted alien creatures and new worlds. This biography reveals a fascinating and complex figure, one who creates and recreates her fiction by drawing on life experiences. At various stages, McCaffrey has been a beautiful young girl who refused to fit into traditional gender roles in high school, a restless young mother who wanted to write, an American expatriate who became an Irish citizen, an animal lover who dreamed of fantasy worlds with perfect relationships between humans and beasts, and a wife trapped in an unhappy marriage just as the women's movement took hold. |
 | | Hobo Life in the Great Depression
Edited by Rebecca Crump, Edwin Mellen Press,2005
The hobo narrative achieves a vividness, authenticity, and directness which might be termed “virtue of location,” drawing the reader into a time warp of Chinatown in Chicago and later the small-town life of Midwestern America in the 1930s, placing it in the tradition of such writers as Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, and Hamlin Garland. The three short stories, written at a time when that genre was receiving increasing recognition as a serious art form, include a poignant tale of a teenager’s rite of passage through humiliation over his father’s perceived lack of education to a profound respect for his father’s wisdom and courage, a story about two old maids who hatch a plot against their ailing older brother that ends in a delightfully humorous final twist, and a macabre tale of a bizarre series of events |
 | | Cajun Women and Mardi Gras: Reading the Rules Backward
Carolyn E. Ware, University of Illinois Press,2007
Cajun Women and Mardi Gras is the first book to explore the importance of women's contributions to the country Cajun Mardi Gras tradition, or Mardi Gras “run.” Most Mardi Gras runs--masked begging processions through the countryside, led by unmasked capitaines--have customarily excluded women. Male organizers explain that this rule protects not only the tradition’s integrity but also women themselves from the event’s rowdy, often drunken, play. |
 | | Ordering the Facade
Katherine T. Henninger, University of North Carolina Press,2007
Focusing on visual and written images of “the southern woman,” Henninger analyzes photography's literary functions in memoir, fiction, screenwriting, and poetry by a wide range of contemporary authors including Dorothy Allison, Ann Beattie, Rosemary Daniell, Julie Dash, Ronlyn Domingue, Josephine Humphreys, Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker. As each of these writers distinctively re-envisions traditional constructions of southern womanhood, Henninger shows, she joins the others in challenging the constrictions of "southern woman" and so changing the meaning of southernness itself. |
 | | Jane Eyre: A Casebook
Edited by Elsie B. Michie,Oxford University Press,2006
Casebooks in Criticism offer analytical and interpretive frameworks for understanding key texts in world literature and film. Each casebook reprints documents relating to a work's historical context and reception, presents the best critical studies, and, when possible, features an interview with the author. Accessible and informative to scholars, students, and nonspecialist readers alike, the books in this series provide a wide range of critical and informative commentaries on major texts. |
 | George Eliot's Dialogue With John Milton
Anna K. Nardo, University of Missouri Press,2003
In George Eliot's Dialogue with John Milton, Anna K. Nardo details how Eliot reimagined Milton's life and art to write epic novels for an age of unbelief. Nardo demonstrates that Eliot directly engaged Milton's poetry, prose, and the well-known legends of his life-transposing, reframing, regendering, and thus testing both the stories told about Milton and the stories Milton told. |
 | | A Feature-Based Syntax Of Functional Categories: The Structure, Acquisition And Specific Impairment of Functional Systems
Michael Hegarty, Mouton de Gruyter Press,2005
This book examines the representation of functional elements such as tense, negation, and complementizers (that is, subordinate clause introducers) as functional categories in human language. Specifically, it develops a construction of functional categories in human language and applies it to the analysis of a variety of syntactic facts in Modern Germanic and Romance languages, as well as the history of English and Modern English. The construction accounts for previously unnoticed aspects of the development of the functional category system in child language acquisition, and for aspects of the developmental lag in functional categories by children with specific language impairment. The book presents a novel, tightly integrated approach to problems in syntactic theory and psycholinguistics.
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 | | Wakefield
Andrei Codrescu, Algonquin Books,2004
Part metaphysical mystery, part travel adventure, part architectural romp, Wakefield explores the late American century and, as his own "inner architecture" shifts, attempts to restore his world through a shocking act that baffles even his jaded Satanic Majesty. Codrescu gives us a novel of big ideas, hilariously absurd and brilliantly observed.
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 | | Poetics of the Creative Process: An Organic Practicum to Playwriting
Femi Euba, University Press of America,2005
Based on the author's teaching methods and experience, the book presents an examination and analysis of the creative process of playwriting through the insight of the very foundations of drama and theatre--the ritual process. Using the playwright as a ritual quester, it attempts to concretize the playwright's creative experience from the gestation of a dramatic idea, through the development of that idea, to its expression as a scripted and theatrical expression.
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 | | The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity
Angeletta Gourdine, Ohio State University Press,2003
"Gourdine provides an unusually absorbing literary analysis how race, place, and gender intersect in the work of three well-known women authors of African descent: Michelle Cliff, Alice Walker, and Ama Ata Aidoo."--Book News
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 | | The Beginnings of English Law
Lisi Oliver, University of Toronto Press,2002
"This welcome addition to the Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations is no mere compilation based on the work of others; it provides a new and original contribution to early English social, legal and linguistic history, and does so, notwithstanding the dauntingly technical issues involved, in a highly readable manner... For anyone interested in the early history of English government, social organization, law, and language, there is now no better starting point than this fine book."-- A. W. Brian Simpson, University of Michigan |
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