Bücher veröffentlicht von Louisiana State University Press

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in 2008 he was in the process of putting together Theater of Memory, a collection of his best poems, both published and unpublished, which he saw as the summation of his life's work.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.

George Balanchine, one of the twentieth century's foremost choreographers, strove to make music visible through dance. In The Art of Gravity, Jay Rogoff extends this alchemy into poetry, discovering in dancing the secret rhythms of our imaginations and the patterns of our lives.

In this groundbreaking study, Gary Ciuba examines how four of the American South's most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction - Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy - expose the roots of violence in southern culture.

A rare, fascinating personality emerges in Donald B. Cole's biography of Amos Kendall (1789-1869), the reputed intellectual engine behind Andrew Jackson's administration and an influential figure in the transformation of young America from an agrarian republic to a capitalist democracy.

In the most extensive work to date on major poets from the mountain South, John Lang takes as his point of departure an oft-quoted remark by Jim Wayne Miller: "Appalachian literature is - and has always been - as decidedly worldly, secular, and profane in its outlook as the [region's] traditional religion appears to be spiritual and otherworldly."

These poems, inclusive of so many perspectives and voices, enter wide sweeps and strong currents of history, not to generalize or point a moral but rather to render moments in the lives of people caught in the effects of time's passing.

Mississippi native Lucy Somerville Howorth (1895-1997) championed for the rights of women long before feminism was a widely recognised movement. Dorothy Shawhan and Martha Swain tell her remarkable life story, from her small-town upbringing to her career as an attorney, to her role as a New Deal activist in Washington DC.

Linda Bolton uses six extraordinarily resonant moments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history to highlight the ethical challenge that the treatment of Native and African persons presented to the new republic's ideal of freedom. Most daringly, she examines the efficacy of the Declaration of Independence as a revolutionary text.

Examines a wide array of African American novels written during the last half of the twentieth century, demonstrating that religious vision not only informs black literature but also serves as a foundation for black culture generally.

In his first collection of poetry and prose, award-winning fiction writer Richard Bausch proves that he is also an accomplished poet. Penned over a span of many years, the poems in These Extremes deal with a wide variety of subjects. Many focus on Bausch's own family and relationships. In one long, touching poem, "Barbara (1943--1974)," the poet memorializes his oldest sister, who died young. He also offers two prose memory pieces, recollections from his childhood and adolescence. In these brief "essays," Bausch draws loving but unsentimental portraits of his father, mother, and other relatives as he reflects on the sense of belonging that he gained from his family -- something he hopes to pass on to his own children in this violent, chaotic world. In "Back Stories," the center of the book, Bausch effortlessly weaves poems around familiar characters from history, literature, movies, and popular culture -- including Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare's Falstaff, Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Sam, the piano player from Casablanca. Decidedly accessible in form, theme, and expression, These Extremes will surprise and delight lovers of poetry and fans of Bausch's stories and novels.

This journal records the Civil War experiences of a sensitive, well-educated, young southern woman. Kate Stone was twenty when the war began, living with her mother, brothers, and younger sister at Brokenburn, their plantation home in Louisiana. Without pretense and with almost photographic clarity, she portrays the South during its darkest hours.

In Moth, Jane Springer uses shaped poems, prose poems, and poems with unusual structures to soar through time and the natural world. Yet, while her lines are aesthetically playful, she examines serious subjects.

A poetic study of the eternal, T.R. Hummer's new collection Eon, as with the other volumes in this trilogy, Ephemeron and Skandalon, offers meditations on the brief arc of our existence, death, and beyond.

Through an analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents an innovative look at the economic divergence between North and South in the antebellum era. He draws a distinction between slavery as a form of work organisation, the aspect that has dominated historical debates, and slavery as a set of property rights.

Explores the religious and ritual practices that linked West-Central Africa with the Lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina during the era of slavery. These two sites mirror the historical trajectory of the transatlantic slave trade which, for centuries, transplanted Kongolese captives to the Lowcountry through Charleston and Savannah.

Playfully invading the traditional territories of poetry, Sally Van Doren throws into question form, subject matter, and the sound and meaning of words. The poems in Sex at Noon Taxes mix straightforward narrative, midwestern vernacular, and linguistic ambivalence, embedded in which is a struggle between the mind and the body.

Though slavery was widespread and antislavery sentiment rare in Alabama, there emerged a small loyalist population, mostly in the northern counties, that persisted in the face of overwhelming odds against their cause. Margaret Storey's welcome study uncovers and explores those Alabamians who maintained allegiance to the Union.

John Farrenkopf takes advantage of the historical perspective the end of the millennium provides to reassess visionary thinker Oswald Spengler and his challenging ideas on world history and politics and modern civilisation.

Too often the war waged west of the Mississippi River has been given short shrift by historians, who have tended to focus their attention on the great battles east of the river. This book looks in detail at the military operations that occurred in Louisiana, most of them minor skirmishes, but some of them battles and campaigns of major importance.

In this sensitive intellectual biography David Blight undertakes the first systematic analysis of the impact of the Civil War on Frederick Douglass' life and thought, offering new insights into the meaning of the war in American history and in the Afro-American experience.

Beginning and ending in Clarence Major's atelier, My Studio demonstrates how art can influence our perception of the world, prompting "all the parts [to] coalesce into a cohesive whole." With precise and engaging imagery, Major contemplates the spaces we occupy and the "beauty in everyday things" from the familiarity of his studio.

In this transformative new collection, Margaret Gibson moves inward, taking surprising, mercurial turns of the imagination, guided by an original and probative intelligence. With a clear eye and an open heart, Gibson writes, "How stark it is to be alive"- and also how glorious, how curious, how intimate.

In 1727, twelve nuns left France to establish a community of Ursuline nuns in New Orleans, the capital of the French colony of Louisiana. In Voices from an Early American Convent, Emily Clark extends the boundaries of early American women's history through the firsthand accounts of these remarkable French missionaries.

Researching the story of elite southern white women's successful quest for a measure of independence between antebellum strictures and the restored patriarchy of Jim Crow, this study shows how they rethought and rebuilt themselves during a brief but important period of relative freedom.