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When people cross the footbridge to Lewis Island in the Delaware River at Lambertville, NJ, they’re in a “whole ‘nother world”: wild and civilized, stable atop changing water and earth. Here lies the last commercial haul seine fishery on the non-tidal Delaware, where Lewis family members have netted since 1888 and have long monitored the fluctuating shad population. The island also serves as a spiritual, recreational, and community site for local and regional visitors, whom the Lewis family welcomes because of their forebear’s “mandate to share the island.” Visitors feel almost immediately that this place is special, but the why is elusive. Folklorist Charlie Groth explains Lewis Island’s unassuming cultural magic by developing the concept of “narrative stewardship,” a practice by which people take care of communal resources (in this case, river, shad, tradition, and community itself) through sharing stories. Anchored in over two decades of field research, this accessible ethnography interweaves the author’s observations as a crew member, stories from various tellers, interviews, history, and cultural theory. Beginning with thick description, the work explores four broad story types—Big Stories, character anecdotes, microlegends, and everyday storying. Groth traces how narratives intertwine with each other and with the physical environment to create sense of place, while participants in various roles navigate belonging. Ultimately, she posits the idea that in an era when telectronics have changed material conditions profoundly and quickly, echoing the way the industrial revolution led to anomie, narrative stewardship embedded in everyday life helps sustain culture and community.

Neil Gaiman (1960-present) currently reigns in the literary world as one of the most critically-decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy-award winning DC/ Vertigo series, The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally-renowned in literary circles for works such as Neverwhere, Coraline, the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, etc. award-winning American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, for children, for the comic reader to the viewer of the BBC's Doctor Who, Gaiman's writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media and every language making him a celebrity on a world-wide scale. Despite Gaiman's incredible contributions to multiple national comics traditions (from such works as Miracleman to the aforementioned The Sandman), to the maturation of American comics as a serious storytelling medium, and to changing the rights of creators to retain ownership of their works, his work continues to be underrepresented in sustained fashion in comics studies. As American Gods tops ratings charts for Starz, Anansi Boys can be found in radio play from the BBC, and adaptations of some of his work from Trigger Warning and Fragile Things become standalone comics by renowned artists, it seems timely to bring the bulk of Gaiman's comics into the scholarly discussion. The thirteen essays and two interviews with Gaiman and his frequent collaborator, artist P. Craig Russell, a formal introduction, forward, and afterword examine the work (specifically-comics, graphic novels, picture books, visual adaptations of prose works, etc.) of Gaiman and a multitude of his collaborative illustrators. The essays radiate from an examination of Gaiman's work surrounding proclamations challenging his readers to "make good art'; what makes Gaiman's work unique and worthy of study lies in his eschewing of typical categorizations and typologies, his constant efforts to make good art-whatever form that art may take-howsoever the genres and audiences may slip into one another. What emerges is a complicated picture of a man who always seems fully-assembled virtually from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own skin and his own voice far later in his life.

In meticulous detail, the book describes the filming, release, and influence of the 1971 film Two-Lane Blacktop. In 1970 the urbane producer Michael Laughlin asked the hippy filmmaker Monte Hellman to direct a script called Two-Lane Blacktop. The cult author Rudy Wurlitzer rewrote the script, the story of two scruffy hot rodders who pick up a girl hitchhiker and race their classic ’55 Chevy against a rich guy’s “factory –made hot rod,” a ’70 GTO Judge. In three of the four lead roles Hellman cast nonactors – the rock stars James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, and the director’s girlfriend, Laurie Bird. Hellman made an existentialist car-racing movie; nobody wins or even finishes the race, the protagonists are doomed to drive around endlessly. The film was slow-paced, the rock stars didn’t sing (and barely spoke), the movie had little music, and Hellman ignored other traditional crowd-pleasing conventions. When he resisted studio pressure to make the movie more conventional and commercial, it flopped at the box office. Universal failed to release the film on video, making it scarce and sought-after, and three of the four lead actors – Wilson Bird and Warren Oates, had untimely deaths, conferring mystique on the film. Many years after its release, the film gained wide acclaim, was released by the prestigious Criterion Collection and was preserved in the National Film Registry. In the book, the directors Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and others tell how the movie influenced their work. Although Two-Lane Blacktop was a harbinger of the demise of New Hollywood films, brought about by the financial costs to Hollywood studios that allowed auteur directors to make non-commercial movies, had Hellman caved in to pressure to make the movie commercial, it would not have become a classic.

Julie Doucet, who started publishing in the late 1980s, is a cartoonist and artist best known for her semi-auto biographical works, as depicted in her Dirty Plotte series as well as My New York Diary. Coming into her own in the late 1990s, when she first started self-publishing her comics, Gabrielle Bell rose to prominence with her 2009 book of short story comics, Cecil and Jordan in New York, as well as her diary comics, which have been recurrently collected in full-length books. While each artist has a unique perspective, style, and world view, the essays in this book investigate these artists' shared investments informal innovation and experimentation and in playing with question soft he auto biographical, the fantastic, and the spaces in between. This volume brings to gether eight original essays, including an extensive introduction, in addition to five republished interviews with the artists. Utilizing a variety of methodologies (archival work, gender theory, genre theory, etc.), the engagements in this book reflect how, despite the importance of finding “a place in side yourself” in order to create, this space is always, for better or worse, also as hared space, culled from, and subject to, surrounding lives, experiences, and subjectivities. Both the world of comics and its critics have been male-dominated for too long. The essays in this volume allow us to think about women’s place in the comics canon, while also appreciating Doucet and Bell as unique artists with powerful personal visions.

The Comics of Rutu Modan: War, Love, and Secrets is a biography and analysis of the work of Rutu Modan, a groundbreaking female graphic novelist from Israel. Modan is best known for her two graphic novels, Exit Wounds and The Property. Modan’s work depicts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Holocaust, and most significantly, the effects of war and trauma on individuals. This book begins with a history of Israeli cartooning from its roots in early Zionism. It provides an in-depth look at the female Israeli cartoonists who preceded Modan, as well as the counter-culture Israeli comics of the 1970s and the art comics boom of the 1990s. The book explores Modan's comics within the Israeli historical, political, sociological and literary background. It offers a history of the comics collective Actus Tragicus, of which Modan was a founder, and shows how the collective paved the way for modern comics to take root in Israel. Using the recurring themes of absence and presence, the book analyzes Modan's strong female characters, the role of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in her work, and the lingering effects of the Holocaust on Israeli society. The book also explores Modan's lesser-known but still important projects, including her comics journalism, her family narratives, and her line of children's comics that revitalizes Israeli classics.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding region in 2005, the city debated whether to press on with Mardi Gras or cancel the parades. Ultimately, they decided to proceed. New Orleans’s recovery certainly has resulted from a complex of factors, but the city’s unique cultural life—perhaps its greatest capital—has been instrumental in bringing the city back from the brink of extinction. Voicing a civic fervor, local writer Chris Rose spoke for the importance of Carnival when he argued to carry on with the celebration of Mardi Gras following Katrina: “We are still New Orleans. We are the soul of America. We embody the triumph of the human spirit. Hell. We ARE Mardi Gras”. Since 2006, a number of new Mardi Gras practices have gained prominence. The new parade organizations or krewes, as they are called, interpret and revise the city’s Carnival traditions but bring innovative practices to Mardi Gras. The history of each parade reveals the convergence of race, class, age, and gender dynamics in these new Carnival organizations. Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans examines six unique, offbeat, Downtown celebrations. Using ethnography, folklore, cultural, and performance studies, the authors analyze new Mardi Gras’s connection to traditional Mardi Gras. The narrative of each krewe’s development is fascinating and unique, illustrating participants’ shared desire to contribute to New Orleans’s rich and vibrant culture.

The matter of money touches the writer's life at every point:in the need to make ends meet, in daily dealings with agents, editors, and publishers, and in the choice of subject matter and the lineaments of the imagined world.William Faulkner was no exception.The people and communities he wrote about were deeply entangled in personal, local, regional, national, and even global networks of industry, commerce, and finance, as was the author himself, whose economic biography often followed, but occasionally bucked, the tumultuous economic trends of the twentieth century.This collection brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the economic contexts of Faulkner's life and work, to follow the proverbial money toward new insights into the Nobel laureate and new questions about his art.Essays address economies of debt and gift-giving in Intruder in the Dust; the legacies of commodity fetishism in Sanctuary and of twentieth-century capitalism's financial turn in The Town; the pegging of self-esteem to financial acumen in the career of The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson; the representational challenges posed by poverty and failure in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend tales; the economics of regional readership and the Depression-era literary market; the aesthetic, monetary, and psychological rewards of writing for Hollywood; and the author's role as benefactor to an aspiring African American college student in the 1950s.The Faulkner we meet in these pages is among modern literature's most incisive and encyclopedic critics of what one contemporary theorist calls the madness of economic reason.

With the rise of new scholarly paradigms in the study of Native American histories and cultures, and the emergence of the Native South as a key concept in US southern studies, the time is more than ripe for a critical reassessment of Native sites, characters, communities, customs, narratives, ways of knowing, and other indigenous elements in the writings of William Faulkner—and of Faulkner’s significance for Native American writers, artists, and intellectuals. From new insights into the Chickasaw sources and far-reaching implications of Faulkner’s fictional place-name “Yoknapatawpha,” to discussions that reveal the potential for indigenous land-, family-, and story-based worldviews to deepen understanding of Faulkner’s fiction (including but not limited to the novels and stories he devoted explicitly to Indian topics), the eleven essays of this volume take the critical analysis of Faulkner’s Native South and the Native South’s Faulkner beyond no-longer generative assessments of the historical accuracy of his Native representations or the colonial hybridity of his Indian characters, turning instead to indigenous intellectual culture for new models, problems, and questions to bring to Faulkner studies. Along the way, readers are treated to illuminating comparisons between Faulkner’s writings and the work of a number of Native American authors, filmmakers, tribal leaders, and historical figures. Faulkner and the Native South brings together Native and non-Native scholars in a stimulating and often surprising critical dialogue about the indigenous wellsprings of Faulkner’s creative energies and about Faulkner’s own complicated presence in Native American literary history.

Working in Europe during the 1930s, mainly for Germany’s UFA studios, and then in America in the 1940s and ’50s, Douglas Sirk brought to all his work a distinctive style that has led to his reputation as one of the 20th century cinema’s great ironists. He did things his own way: for him, rules were there to be broken, whether they were the decrees of Nazi authorities trying to turn film into propaganda or of studios insisting that characters’ problems should always be solved and that endings should always restore order, providing what Sirk used to call “emergency exits” for audiences. This study of Sirk is the first comprehensive critical overview of the filmmaker’s entire career, examining the ’50s melodramas for which he has been rightly acclaimed – films such as All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels and Imitation of Life – and instructively looking beyond them at his earlier work, which includes musicals, comedies, thrillers, war movies and westerns. Offering fresh insights into all of these films and situating them in the culture of their times, the book also incorporates extensive interview material drawn from a variety of sources, including the author’s own conversations with the director. Furthermore, it undertakes a detailed reconsideration of the generally overlooked novels and plays that served as sources for Sirk’s films, as well as providing a critical overview of previous Sirk commentary, from the time of the director’s “rediscovery” in the late 1960s to the present day.

Folklore in Baltic History: Resistance and Resurgence is a study of how the discipline of folklore studies was treated under the totalitarian rule of the USSR in the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from 1945 to 1991 and what role the study of folklore has played since independence in 1991. It is a “dramatic history” of what happened to folklorists, folklore archives and folklore departments in the universities under the Soviet rule. On the one hand was a coercive and brutal state and on the other peoples conscious of their national, cultural and linguistic identity as comprised in their folklore. On the one hand, scholars and archivists fell in line and on the other, continued to subvert the coercion by devising ingenious ways of communicating among themselves. When freedom came in 1991 they were ready to create the record of undocumented brutality by documenting life stories and oral history. Sadhana Naithani juxtaposes the work of folklore scholars in the Baltic countries between 1945 and 1991 to the life of the people in the same period to reach an evaluation of the Baltic folkloristics. She concludes that the study of folklore has been an act of resistance and has aided in the resurgence of freedom and identity in the post-Soviet Baltic countries.

Funny Girls: Guffaws, Guts, and Gender in Classic American Comics is the first full-length critical study to examine the important cadre of young female protagonists that permeated US newspapers strips and comics books during the first half of the twentieth century.Many of the earliest, most successful, and most influential titles from this era featured elementary-aged girls as their central characters, such as Little Orphan Annie, Nancy, and Little Lulu. Far from embodying a now-forgotten facet of twentieth century print culture, these figures remain icons ofUS popular and material culture. Recognizing the cadre of Funny Girls who played such a significant role in the popular appeal and commercial success of American comics during the first half of the twentieth century challenges longstanding perceptions about the gender dynamics operating during this era.In addition, they provide information about a wide range of socio-political issues, including the popular perceptions about children, mainstream representations of girlhood, and changing national attitudes regarding youth and youth culture.Finally, but just as importantly, strips like Little Lulu, Little Orphan Annie, and Nancy also shed light on another major phenomenon within comics:branding, licensing, and merchandising. In discussing these are other issues, Funny Girls gives much needed attention to an influential, but long neglected, aspect of comics history in the United States.

Krokodil produced state-sanctioned satirical comments on Soviet and international affairs from 1922 onward. Authored by professional and non-professional contributors, and published by Pravda in Moscow, it became the satirical magazine with the largest circulation in the world. Every Soviet citizen and every scholar of the USSR was familiar with Krokodil as the most significant and influential source of graphic satire in the USSR. This book uses an original framework for reconsidering the forms, production, consumption, and functions of Krokodil magazine. It considers the magazine's content, structures and conventions; it also uses modern cultural and media theory to look beyond content analysis to consider visual language and the performative construction of character. Empirical analysis of Krokodil is thus used to extend and nuance our understanding of Soviet graphic satire beyond state-sponsored propaganda. In several ways, this book challenges existing approaches. It conducts close readings of a large range of different types of cartoons that have not before been discussed in depth, and it does so in ways that reveal new insights. It shows that Krokodil's satire was complex, subtle and intermedial. It highlights the importance of Krokodil's readers' and artists' collaborative exploration and shaping of the boundaries of permissible discourse, and it argues that Krokodil's cartoons simultaneously affirmed, refracted and critiqued official discourses, counterposing them with visions of Soviet citizens' responses. Ideology, Krokodil's satire suggests, is an interpretive tool for negotiating everyday reality and official discourses, and it was not always to be taken seriously.

Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies talks about things folklorists don’t usually talk about. It ponders the tacit aspects of folklore and folklore studies, looking into the unarticulated expectations placed upon people whenever they talk about folklore and how those expectations necessarily affect the folklore they are talking about. The book’s chapters are wide-ranging in subject and style, yet they all orbit the idea that much of folklore, both as a phenomenon and as a field, hinges upon tacit or absent assumptions about who we are and what it is that we do. The authors articulate theories and methodologies for making sense of these absences, and, in the process, they offer critical new insights into discussions of race, authenticity, community, folklore and literature, popular culture, and scholarly authority. Taken as a whole, the book represents a new and challenging way of looking into the ways that groups come together to make meaning. In addition to the main chapters, the book also includes eight “interstitials,” shorter chapters that consider understudied and under-appreciated aspects of folklore. These discussions, which range from a consideration of knitting in public to the ways that invisibility shapes an internet meme to Bob Dylan, are presented as questions more than answers, encouraging readers to think about what folklore and folklore studies might look like if practitioners only chose to look at the subject from a slightly different angle.

Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work and Sex in the South is about southern modernist fictions centered on the imagined lives of black folk workers from the 1930s to the 1960s. This period encompasses the clashes surrounding New Deal-era policy reforms and their legacies as well as a surge in Popular Front artistic expressions from the Depression, to World War II, to the Civil Rights era and following. Labor Pains sets out to show that black working-class representations of the Popular Front have not only been about the stakes of race and labor but also call upon an imagined black folk to do other work. The book considers tropes of black folk workers across genres of southern literature to demonstrate the reach of black radicalism and how the black folk worker was used to engage the representative feelings we think we know and the affective feelings that remained unsaid. Labor Pains emphasizes feeling, namely the sensual and the sexual, imbued in narratives by George Wylie Henderson, William Attaway, Eudora Welty, and Sarah Elizabeth Wright. Each employs tropes of black folk workers to get a fuller picture of gender and desire during this time. As a result, a glimpse into feminist and gender-aware aspects of the outgrowths of black radicalism come into view.

This volume brings together for the first time essays that cover all major (currently) spoken languages in the state, all major language research in Louisiana, and all sites of language activism.This allows for a cohesive, comparative understanding of the state's polyglot history and each language's place in it. The book presents work from academics and community members, providing both insider views and the views of outsider scholars with years of experience with the languages in question. The approachable style makes this appropriate for both the general public and scholars of the state and language trends.

Sixty years ago, one historian described state legal history as a “wasteland,” a neglected but vitally important part of American history. Legal histories of individual states are now beginning to appear. With this book, Mississippi joins their ranks. The book describes the evolution of Mississippi’s legal system and analyses the changes in that system during the state’s first 200 years. The book examines the interaction of law and society during six key periods of change: (1) Mississippi’s colonial and territorial eras and early years of statehood, when the foundations for its legal system were laid; (2) the evolution of Mississippi slavery and slave law during the early nineteenth century; (3) the state’s role as a leader of legal reform during the age of Andrew Jackson; (4) the unfolding of the Mississippi’s legal response to emancipation and wartime economic devastation during the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow eras; (5) Mississippi’s legal evolution during the Progressive Era and its response to the crisis of the Great Depression; and (6) the state’s legal response to the civil rights and cultural revolutions that have unfolded since 1950.

The African colonization movement plays a peculiar role in the study of racial equality in the United States. For white colonizationists, the movement was positioned as a compromise between slavery and abolition. For free blacks, colonization offered the hope of freedom, but not within America’s borders. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard shows how politics and identity were negotiated in middle of the public discourse on race, slavery, and freedom in America. Operating from a position of relative power, white advocates argued that colonization was worthy of support from the federal government. Stillion Southard analyzes the speeches of Henry Clay, Elias B. Caldwell, and Abraham Lincoln as efforts to engage with colonization at the level of deliberation. Between Clay and Caldwell’s speeches at the founding of the American Colonization Society in 1816 and Lincoln’s final public effort to encourage colonization in 1862, Stillion Southard explores the speeches and writings of free blacks who grappled with colonization’s conditional promises of freedom. The book examines an array of discourses to explore the complex issues of identity facing free blacks who attempted to meaningfully engage in colonization efforts. From a peculiarly voiced Counter Memorial against the ACS, to the letters of wealthy black merchant Louis Sheridan negotiating for his passage to Liberia, to the civically-minded orations of Hilary Teage in Liberia, Peculiar Rhetoric brings into light the intricacies of blacks who attempted to meaningfully engage in colonization.

When we generalize about children, we are often also implicitly generalizing about their care, from within a "middle-class" view of "nuclear" family. These as sumptions rely on anorm that few of us actually fit. Yet it is very difficult to talk about children from completely outside of such an assumed model of support in the private or "islanded" sphere. In contrast, children in literature are just as often disconnected from family in order to have greater adventures in more public spaces. They must leave the confines of the private family to for gean other sphere in which to grow. But the real experiences of children at tempting public connection or freedom to roam are farmore complicated, ranging from captivity and containment to escape and self-reliance. Utilizing both fictions of child adventure and accounts of experiences by actual children, Honey mandemonstrates that childwelfare depends upon not just protection, but also participation. How can protection, which sounds so comforting, do harm? Perils of Protection will trace how the best of intentions to protect children can none the lesshurt them if leaving them unprepared to acton the irown behalf. Each chapter will center on this perilous pattern in a different context: "women and children first" rescue hierarchies, geographic restriction, abandonment, censorship, and illness. Analysis from adventures real and fictionalized will offer the reader high jinx and heroism at sea, the rush of risk, finding new families, resisting censorship through discovering shared political identity, and breaking the pretences of sentimentality.

This book proposes to answer the pressing philosophical as well as psychological question of why people repeat themselves. It redefines folklore as traditional knowledge that serves this need in human lives and develops a "practice theory" around this idea. Practice, more than other suggested keywords of performance or enactment in social theory, connects localized culture with the vernacular idea that "this is the way we do things around here." The term invites study of what people do repeatedly to understand what they have in "mind." Demonstrating the application of this theory in folkloristic studies, Bronner offers four provocative case studies of psychocultural meanings that arise from traditional "frames of action" and address issues of the day: labeling of boogiemen to express fear of sexual molestation, connecting "wild child" beliefs to school shootings, identifying the crisis of masculinity in adolescent expression. Turning his analysis to the analysts of tradition, Bronner uses practice theory to evaluate the agenda of folklorists in shaping perceptions of tradition-centered "folk societies" such as the Amish, unpacking the culturally based rationale of public folklore programming, interpreting the evolving idea of folk museums in a digital world, and assessing how the terms folklorists use and the things they do affect how people think about tradition. This is a book intended to think about what people do in the name of tradition, and why.

Race and Radio: Pioneering Black Broadcasters in New Orleans explicates the emergence of blacks in broadcasting in New Orleans. The racial integration of changed the medium making it a channel for African American discourse, the music and interviews of local black musicians, and innovative black rhetoric. O.C.W. Taylor was the city's first black radio announcer. He hosted an unprecedented talk show, the “Negro Forum,” on WNOE beginning in 1946 and continuing for 22 years. Doctors, journalists, owners of funeral homes, directors of non-profits, and other professionals spoke. Clergy from various denominations discussed topics such as practical applications of Biblical stories. The guests inspired linked fate among listeners who had never heard African American voices on radio and believed they could also achieve. In 1949, listeners heard the arrival of Vernon "Dr. Daddy-O" Winslow's smooth, articulate, and disk jockey creative voice. The Fitzgerald Advertising Agency hired him to sell Jax beer to the black market using his show “Jivin’ with Jax” broadcast on WWEZ. He interviewed African American artists and played their music. After arriving from Chicago in 1953, Larry McKinley began informing blacks over WMRY of local activities of the Civil Rights Movement in the city. In 1957, he moved to WYLD which morphed into WMRY. This thick historiography situates Race and Radio within theories of racism, ideological hegemony, and marginalization, concepts explaining of why whites locked blacks out of the production and dissemination of media content.