Bøker utgitt av Louisiana State University Press

With this study Karl F. Zender offers fresh readings of individual novels, themes, and motifs while also assessing the impact of recent politicized interpretations on our understanding of Faulkner's achievement. Sympathetically acknowledging the need to decenter the canon, Zender's searching interrogation of current theory clears a breathing space for Faulkner and his readers between the fustier remnants of New Criticism and the excesses of post-structuralism. Each chapter opens with a balanced presentation of the genuine gifts contemporary theory has bestowed on our comprehension of a particular novel or problem in Faulkner criticism and then proceeds with a groundbreaking reading. "The Politics of Incest" challenges older psychoanalytic interpretations of Faulkner's use of the incest motif, and "Faulkner's Privacy" defends the novelist's difficulty or "reticence" as an aesthetic resistance against the rude candor of deregionalized and depersonalized culture. Subsequent chapters take up the volatile issues of Faulkner's representations of women and of African Americans, and a close reading of the classic "Barn Burning" critiques the current tendency to blur the concepts of patriarchy and paternity. The elegiac final chapter, "Where is Yoknapatawpha County?" draws on a comparison with John Updike's Pennsylvania fiction and a reading of Joan Williams's The Wintering to explore Faulkner's disinclination to represent the quotidian realities of southern life in his later novels. Zender shows that Faulkner's stylistic withdrawal attempts to "transform into beauty" his alienation from the postwar world and his fear of aging. That Faulkner and the Politics of Reading itself recovers and gives new luster to Faulkner's beauty will surely please, in the author's words, "those readers . . . for whom literature is less a mechanism of social change than a source of pleasure." The originality of its critical vision will inspire Faulkner scholars, students of American literature, and general readers.

In The Politics of Faith during the Civil War, Timothy L. Wesley examines the engagement of both northern and southern preachers in politics during the American Civil War, revealing an era of denominational, governmental, and public scrutiny of religious leaders. Controversial ministers risked ostracism within the local community, censure from church leaders, and arrests by provost marshals or local police. In contested areas of the Upper Confederacy and Border Union, ministers occasionally faced deadly violence for what they said or would not say from their pulpits. Even silence on political issues did not guarantee a preacher's security, as both sides arrested clergymen who defied the dictates of civil and military authorities by refusing to declare their loyalty in sermons or to pray for the designated nation, army, or president. The generation that fought the Civil War lived in arguably the most sacralized culture in the history of the United States. The participation of church members in the public arena meant that ministers wielded great authority. Wesley outlines the scope of that influence and considers, conversely, the feared outcomes of its abuse. By treating ministers as both individual men of conscience and leaders of religious communities, Wesley reveals that the reticence of otherwise loyal ministers to bring politics into the pulpit often grew not out of partisan concerns but out of doctrinal, historical, and local factors. The Politics of Faith during the Civil War sheds new light on the political motivations of homefront clergymen during wartime, revealing how and why the Civil War stands as the nation's first concerted campaign to check the ministry's freedom of religious expression.

From its founding in 1906, the Louisiana State University Law School has offered its students a truly distinctive legal education. Integrated programs in Louisiana's unique civil law, in Anglo-American common law and federal law, and in international and comparative law create a global law curriculum recognized for both its academic excellence and its outstanding teaching, research, and public service faculty. In LSU Law, alumnus and professor W. Lee Hargrave chronicles the first seventy years of this institution--from its opening classes to the death of its longtime dean, Paul M. Hebert, and its transformation into an autonomous Law Center. He reveals the faces and forces that have helped to create the special mystique surrounding the school and the significance attached to a law degree from LSU. After an initial discussion of the legal profession in Louisiana before the establishment of formal academic instruction, Hargrave maps the school's growth and development. He charts the organizational difficulties of the early years, reputation building in the twenties, politically influenced extravagance in the thirties, wartime challenges in the forties, return to normalcy in the fifties, steady growth in the sixties, and overcrowding in the seventies. Throughout, he explores all aspects of the school--its administrators and faculty, student body, shifting admission requirements, curriculum, grading system debates, influence on Louisiana's legal community and state government, and much more. He also describes how students lived and learned during each era and discusses the effects of outside people and events--including Huey P. Long, World War II, and the civil rights movement--on the school. Hargrave tells the history of the LSU Law School in the context of changes that occurred in legal education throughout the United States, making his work of interest to legal historians and the national law school community. Alumni will also appreciate this detailed study of what has become a Louisiana institution.

In The Cemeteries of New Orleans, Peter B. Dedek reveals the origins and evolution of the Crescent City's world-famous necropolises, exploring both their distinctive architecture and their cultural impact. Drawing on a fascinating body of research, Dedek takes readers from muddy fields of crude burial markers to extravagantly designed cities of the dead, illuminating a vital and vulnerable piece of New Orleans's identity. Where many histories of New Orleans cemeteries focus on the famous people buried within them, Dedek sets his sights on the marble cutters, burial society members, journalists, and tourists who shaped these graveyards into internationally recognizable emblems of the city. In his detailed exploration of cemetery architecture, Dedek reveals the impacts of ancient and medieval grave traditions and styles, the city's geography, and the arrival of trained European tomb designers, such as the French architect J. N. B. de Pouilly in 1833 and Italian artist and architect Pietro Gualdi in 1851. As Dedek shows, the nineteenth century was a particularly critical era in the city's cemetery design. Traditional French and Spanish patterns prevailed until the first garden cemetery--Metairie Cemetery--was built on the site of an old racetrack in 1872. Like the older walled cemeteries, this iconic venue served as a lavish expression of fraternal and ethnic unity, a backdrop to exuberant social celebrations, and a destination for sightseers. During this time, cultural and religious customs, such as the celebration of All Saints' Day and the practice of Voodoo rituals, flourished within the spatial bounds of these resting places. Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, episodes of neglect and destruction gave rise to groups that aimed to preserve the historic cemeteries of New Orleans--an endeavor that, according to Dedek, is still wanting for resources and political will. Containing abundant illustrations, The Cemeteries of New Orleans is a comprehensive and intriguing resource on these fascinating historic sites.

Now back in print, Vereen M. Bell's The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy was the first critical book devoted to an author who would become one of the most celebrated American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Published in 1988, before McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and had his novels adapted into acclaimed films, Bell's study offered the first systematic review of the author's work. According to Bell, part of the difficulty of analyzing McCarthy's fiction is that the novelist by design works against all conventional ways of seeing and dealing with the world. Any formulaic readings, particularly those associated with the traditional schemes of southern literature, will be distorted. McCarthy's novels are provocatively mysterious yet specific and vivid as well. They are also freestanding and unclassifiable Bell shows how McCarthy transforms the world through language, how he reconstitutes both urban and rural settings so that otherwise barely articulate and unheroic people live vividly in a context that is both modernist and antimodernist. In this respect, Bell argues, McCarthy's work is about the tension between visions of the world and the intractable, opposing materiality of it, between the mysteriousness of an individual's private engagement with experience and social normality's tendency to flatten it out. At the same time, Bell shows McCarthy's infatuation with the reality of evil, how the evil in human form in his novels is as inexplicably gratuitous and violent as the inhuman form of random and destructive natural events. Such violence, for McCarthy, is built into existence and cannot be evaded or rationalized away. With detailed readings of McCarthy's first five novels--The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian--Bell demonstrates the novelist's faith in the protean capacity of language to disclose the layered possibilities and richness of being. Widely cited by scholars, Bell's book established many of the foundational critical frameworks for approaching McCarthy's work. It is now available in an affordable paperback edition.

"Although relatively unknown today, Martin Behrman dominated New Orleans politics in the early twentieth century, serving as mayor from 1904 to 1920 and again in 1925 for a brief period before his death. His political organization--loosely referred to as 'The Regulars,' 'The Old Regulars,' or 'The Choctaw Club'--was in complete control of the city during a period of rapid change. Behrman's model of government, often called 'Behrmanism' by detractors, was a pragmatic hybrid of machine politics, progressive reform, populism, and federalism that eventually found its way into Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Huey Long's political platform. The Boss of New Orleans is a masterful examination of Behrman's remarkable life and political career, during which he rose from the orphaned son of immigrant parents to the Crescent City's undisputed leader. As mayor, he blended consensus building with the exercise of raw power in ways that few politicians of the era could match, allowing him to navigate numerous controversial events, including the implementation of national prohibition and the forced closure of Storyville, the city's red-light district. Behrman successfully managed the city's last epidemic of yellow fever and built new schools and infrastructure that moved New Orleans along the path of modernity, earning a reputation as a hard-working, detail-oriented manager of city and machine affairs. As Criss demonstrates, with the singular--and deeply troubling--exception of the disenfranchisement of Black voters, Behrman led an era of truly progressive change in the Crescent City"

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) was one of the most popular American writers at the turn of the twentieth century, and her annual Christmas stories appeared in magazines and periodicals across the globe. Since then, the extraordinary stories that once delighted her legions of fans every festive season have gone largely out of print and unread. Now, for the first time, The Last Gift presents a collection of Freeman's best Christmas writing, introducing these funny, poignant, provocative, and surprisingly timely holiday tales to a new generation of readers.

In The Sentence, Morri Creech interrogates our daily lives and experiences to examine the anxieties and despair that often attend our awareness of mortality. Through a variety of subjects, and through styles ranging from rhyme and meter to prose poetry, he takes an unflinching look at what it means to live in the shadow of the end, the common fate to which each of us is sentenced.

The Dirty South examines the shifting significances of the South as a constructed, fantasized region in the American psyche, particularly its frequent association with tropes of dirt that emphasize soil, garbage, trash, grit, litter, mud, swamp water, slime, and pollution. Beginning with iconic works from the 1970s such as Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, James A. Crank traces the image of a "dirty" South into the twenty-first century to explore the social, political, and psychological effects of the region's hold on the imaginations of southerners and nonsoutherners alike. With a focus on media forms through which southern identity gets articulated and questioned--including horror movies, Swamp Thing comics, and popular music by artists such as Waylon Jennings and OutKast--The Dirty South probes the sustained fascination with southern dirtiness while reflecting on its causes and consequences since the end of the civil rights era. Highlighting the period from 1970 to 2020, during which the South began to represent several new possible identities for the nation as a whole and for the area itself, Crank considers the ways that southerners have used depictions of dirt to create and police boundaries and to contest those boundaries. Each chapter pairs prominent literary or cultural texts from the 1970s with more contemporary works, such as Jordan Peele's film Get Out, which recycle similar investments or, critically, challenge the inherent whiteness of the earlier images. By historicizing fantasies of the region and connecting them to the first decades of the twenty-first century, The Dirty South reveals that notions about southern dirtiness proliferate not because they lend authenticity or relevancy to the U.S. South, but because they aid so conspicuously in the zombified work of tethering investors (real and imagined) to a graveyard of ideas.

Though it ended more than thirty years ago, the Cold War still casts a long shadow over American society. Red Reckoning examines how the great ideological conflict of the twentieth century transformed the nation and forced Americans to reconsider almost every aspect of their society, culture, and identity. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the volume's contributors examine a broad array of topics, including the Cold War's impact on national security, race relations, gun culture and masculinity, law, college football, advertising, music, film, free speech, religion, and even board games. Above all, Red Reckoning brings a vitally important era back to life for those who lived through it and for students and scholars wishing to understand it.

For two centuries, nearly all historical accounts of American theatre have focused on New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. As a result, the story of theatre on the frontier consists primarily of regional studies with limited scope. Thomas A. Bogar's Theatre on the American Frontier provides an overdue, balanced treatment of the accomplishments of the troupes working in the trans-Appalachian West. From its origins in late eighteenth-century Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Louisville, frontier theatre grew by the close of the nineteenth century to encompass more than a dozen centers of vibrant theatrical activity. Audiences--mainly pioneers struggling with the hardships of establishing a life in the backcountry--enjoyed thrilling melodramas, the comedies of George Colman the Younger and John O'Keeffe, and even the tragedies of William Shakespeare. Theatre companies that ventured into this challenging and unfamiliar territory did so with a combination of daring and determination. Bogar's comprehensive study brings this neglected history into the spotlight, cementing these figures and their theatrical productions and practices in their rightful place.

Nowhere in the United States did the Age of Democratic Revolution exert as profound an influence as in New Orleans. In 1809-10, refugees of the Haitian Revolution doubled the size of the city. In 1811, hundreds of Saint-Dominguan, African, and Louisianan plantation workers marched downriver toward the city in the nation's largest-ever slave revolt. Itinerant revolutionaries from throughout the Atlantic congregated in New Orleans in the cause of Latin American independence. Together with the refugee soldiers of the Haitian Revolution (both Black and white), their presence proved decisive in the Battle of New Orleans. After defeating the British, the soldiers rejoined the struggle against Spanish imperialism. In Creole New Orleans in the Revolutionary Atlantic, 1775-1877, Caryn Cossé Bell sets forth these momentous events and much more to document the revolutionary era's impact on the city. Bell's study begins with the 1883 memoir of Hélène d'Aquin Allain, a French Creole and descendant of the refugee community, who grew up in antebellum New Orleans. Allain's d'Aquin forebears fought alongside the Savarys, a politically influential free family of color, in the Haitian Revolution. Forced from Saint-Domingue/Haiti, the allied families retreated to New Orleans. Bell's reconstruction of the d'Aquin family network, interracial alliances, and business partnerships provides a productive framework for exploring the city's presence at the crossroads of the revolutionary Atlantic. Residing in New Orleans in the heyday of French Romanticism, Allain experienced a cultural revolution that exerted an enormous influence on religious beliefs, literature, politics, and even, as Bell documents, the practice of medicine in the city. In France, the highly politicized nature of the movement culminated in the 1848 French Revolution with its abolition of slavery and enfranchisement of freed men and women. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Afro-Creole leaders of the diasporic community pointed to events in France and stood in the forefront of the struggle to revolutionize race relations in their own nation. As Bell demonstrates, their cultural and political legacy remains a formidable presence in twenty-first-century New Orleans.

"Frank Cirillo's "The Abolitionist Civil War" examines the dramatic transformation of the abolitionist movement during the American Civil War, specifically its far-reaching origins, shifting contours, and drastic consequences for both abolitionism and the nation."--

In the early modern British Atlantic world, the comparison of enslaved people to animals, particularly dogs, cattle, or horses, was a common device used by enslavers to dehumanize and otherwise reduce the existence of the enslaved. Letters, memoirs, and philosophical treatises of the enslaved and formerly enslaved bear testament to the methods used to dehumanize them. In Empire of Brutality, Christopher Michael Blakley explores how material relationships between enslaved people and animals bolstered the intellectual dehumanization of the enslaved. By reconsidering dehumanization in the light of human-animal relations, Blakley offers new insights into the horrific institution later challenged by Black intellectuals in multiple ways. Using the correspondence of the Royal African Company, specimen catalogs and scientific papers of the Royal Society, plantation inventories and manuals, and diaries kept by slaveholders, Blakley describes human-animal networks spanning from Britain's slave castles and outposts throughout western Africa to plantations in the Caribbean and American Southeast. They combine approaches from environmental history, history of science, and philosophy to examine slavery from the ground up and from the perspectives of the enslaved. Blakley's work reveals how African captives who became commodified through exchanges of cowry sea snails between slavers in the Bight of Benin later went on to collect zoological specimens in Barbados and Virginia for institutions such as the Royal Society. On plantations, where enslaved people labored alongside cattle, donkeys, horses, and other animals to make the agricultural fortunes of slaveholders, Blakley shows how the enslaved resisted these human-animal pairings by stealing animals for their own purposes--such as fugitives who escaped their slaveholder's grasp by riding stolen horses. Because of experiences like these, writers and thinkers of African descent who survived slavery later attacked the institution in public as fundamentally dehumanizing, one that corrupted the humanity of both slaveholders and the enslaved.

The poems in The Gentle Art, a compelling new collection from William Wenthe, move between the life of the painter James McNeill Whistler and a poetic version of the author, who is at once inspired and disturbed by Whistler. The present-day author sheds light on Whistler's artistic vocation and the beauty of his paintings, most notably the liminal London riverscapes that he named Nocturnes, yet recoils at the cost of Whistler's devotion to art: lovers abandoned, friends turned into enemies, his own children given away to adoption. Creating a kind of dual biography, Wenthe grapples with feelings of admiration and disaffection toward Whistler as he tries to perform his own roles as parent, partner, and poet. While some of the poems are narrative, their overall effect is associative--two lives superimposed in a double exposure, with attention to what the contrast of two centuries, the nineteenth and the twenty-first, reveals about the relationship of art to money, class, and politics.

Provides a comprehensive analysis of crimes of violence in the US from the 1880s to the 1930s. Combining the theoretical perspectives and methodological rigour of criminology with a synthesis of historical scholarship as well as original research and analysis, Barry Latzer challenges conventional thinking about violent crime of this era.

Offers a rare primary document from an important moment in history: the Spanish War of Independence, which culminated in the expulsion of France from the Iberian Peninsula in 1814. Fernando Blanco White's diary offers personal insights into how people in Europe and across its global empires coped with profound transformations.

Never in human history has travel been so accessible to so many. But--amid an escalating climate crisis that threatens the homes of vulnerable people across the world--has the human cost of trekking the globe become too high? Paul Lindholdt links firsthand narratives with research about the travel trade, telling stories of his reluctant voyages while arguing that carbon-intensive trips abroad may be offset if adventurers come to know and love the landscapes closer to home. Tourism may be the planet's largest industry, but Interrogating Travel advises readers to stay mindful of the consequences of their journeys, whether visiting local getaways or some of Earth's most remote locations.

A Girl's Life in New Orleans presents the diary of Ella Grunewald, an upper-middle-class teenager in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century. Grunewald, the daughter of one of the Crescent City's leading music dealers, used her journal to record the major events of her day-to-day life, documenting family, friendships, schooling, musical education, and social activities. Her entries frequently describe illness, death, and other tragedies. Though attentive to the city's classical music scene, Grunewald also recounts theater shows, Carnival balls and parades, Catholic religious observances, and the World's Fair that the city hosted in 1884. Expertly annotated and introduced by Hans Rasmussen, Grunewald's journal is a rare window on the life of a young woman in the South between 1884 and 1886. Adding depth to that account, Rasmussen includes a shorter journal Grunewald kept of her family's travels in Italy and Germany in the spring of 1890. In it, she describes visits to Catholic churches, museums, Roman ruins, and other tourist attractions. Tragically, Grunewald contracted malaria during the latter part of the journey and died overseas at age twenty-two.

In Echo and Critique, Florian Gargaillo skillfully charts the ways that poets have responded to the clichés of public speech from the start of the Second World War to the present. Beginning around 1939, many public intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic lamented that the political lexicon had become saturated with bureaucratic stock phrases such as "the fight for freedom," "revenue enhancement," and "service the target," designed for the mass media and used to euphemize, obfuscate, and evade. Instead of ridding their writing of such language, many poets parroted these tropes as a means of exploring the implications of such expressions, weighing their effects, and identifying the realities they distort and suppress. With its attentiveness to linguistic particulars, poetry proved especially well-suited to this innovative mode of close listening and intertextual commentary. At the same time, postwar poets recognized their own susceptibility to dead language, so that co-opting political clichés obliged them to scrutinize their writing and accept the inevitability of cant while simultaneously pushing against it. This innovative study blends close readings with historical context as it traces the development of echo and critique in the work of seven poets who expertly deployed the method throughout their careers: W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Robert Lowell, Josephine Miles, and Seamus Heaney. Gargaillo's analysis reveals that poetry can encourage us to listen diligently and critically to the insincerity ubiquitous in public discourse.

In Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth confronts why the environmental stories told about the U.S. South curve inevitably toward distressing plotlines. Examining more than a dozen works of postbellum literature and cinema, Spoth's analysis winds from John Muir's walking journey across the war-torn South, through the troubling of southern environmentalism's modernity by Faulkner and Hurston, past the accounts of its acceleration in Welty and O'Connor, and finally into the present, uncovering how the tragic econarrative is transformed by contemporary food studies, climate fiction, and speculative tales inspired by the region. Phrased as a reaction to the rising temperatures and swelling sea levels in the South, Ruin and Resilience conceptualizes an environmental, ecocritical ethos for the southern United States that takes account of its fundamentally vulnerable status and navigates the space between its reactionary politics and its ecological failures.

A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written is a bilingual anthology of poetry written by fifteen Venezuelan poets who are currently residing in Chile. Edited and translated by David M. Brunson, the volume encompasses the work of young poets coming from many different circumstances. Some have already published several books, while others have just begun their careers as writers. The vast majority of the original Spanish texts appeared in books, anthologies, and magazines across Chile, Venezuela, and elsewhere in the Hispanosphere. In recent years, more than six million people have fled Venezuela in one of the world's largest mass migrations, stemming in part from an ongoing humanitarian crisis caused by the country's backsliding into authoritarianism, brutal political repression, corruption, food and medical shortages, violent crime, hyperinflation, and the mismanagement of Venezuela's natural and financial resources, first by Hugo Chávez and presently by Nicolás Maduro. Begun during Brunson's travels in Chile amid the 2019-2020 protest movement, this dual-language collection aims to elevate the individual voices of each migrant poet, to connect them with new readers, and to enrich the body of literature available in English.

A book-length sequence of poems, Matthew Thorburn's String tells the story of a teenage boy's experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy's fractured, echoing voice--in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation--String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his.

Jenny Molberg's third collection of poetry, The Court of No Record, serves as both evidence and testimony against a legal system that often fails victims of physical trauma and domestic abuse. Drawing inspiration from true crime investigations and artifacts, including Frances Glessner Lee's crime scene dioramas and the tragic aftermaths of two serial killers who preyed upon women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Molberg probes a cultural obsession with violence that performs active erasure of victims' lives. By engaging with historical texts through a personal lens, she sheds light on survivors who do not find justice and looks toward a future of positive systemic reformation.