211 Years of the Volunteer State
Tennessee became the sixteenth state on June 1, 1796. The University of Tennessee Press invites you to Read and discover more about the Volunteer State—starting with the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, available in a hardcover print edition and in a free online edition.
View our complete list of titles about the great state of Tennessee at
http://utpress.org/browse/
Pictured left to right: Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist Sam Venable; Carpe Librum Booksellers owners Martha Arnett, Shiela Wood-Navarro, and Flossie McNabb Sonneland; former University of Tennessee president Dr. Joe Johnson; University of Tennessee Press director Jennifer Siler.
The University of Tennessee Press presented Carpe Librum Booksellers with the Joseph E. Johnson Award of Appreciation at a reception on Tuesday, May 15, 2007, 7:00 p.m. at Carpe Librum Booksellers. The owners of Carpe Librum Booksellers are Flossie McNabb Sonneland, Shiela Wood-Navarro, Claire Poole and Martha Arnett. The award is in recognition of their support of The University of Tennessee Press and its mission in the community and region. Former University of Tennessee president Dr. Joe Johnson—in whose honor the award is named—presented the award.
The University of Tennessee Press selected Carpe Librum to receive the Johnson Award for their dedication to Knoxville and its unique heritage. Carpe Librum has showed continuous commitment to local authors and local subjects. They host book clubs, local, regional, and national books signings, and feature events and other special activities throughout the year.
Journeyman’s Road
Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York Adam Gussow
“Adam Gussow has lived the Blues life. By some miracle he has also lived to write about it. Whether his subject is a novel by Faulkner or the romance of buying an amp, his prose is as dynamic as a guitar solo by Stevie Ray Vaughan.” —Krin Gabbard, author of Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture
“Adam not only knows the blues…he feels it. Read this book and you will too.”
—Shemekia Copeland Harmonica lessons from Adam Gussow on YouTube
Listen to music by Adam Gussow and Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee
View Adam Gussow’s book tour and scheduled performances
Read more
Grassroots Music in the Upper Cumberland
Edited by William Lynwood Montell
“This book is, in a sense, a folk history of the music cultures of this area, and one full of rich detail and cultural surprises.” —Charles K. Wolfe
In this new book, various authors cover a variety of musical styles: English ballads, gospel, bluegrass, modern country, and even rock ’n’ roll—all find their unique expression in the musical mosaic of the Upper Cumberland. Read more
Fiddlin’ Charlie Bowman
An East Tennessee Old-Time Music Pioneer and His Musical Family
Bob L. Cox
With an Afterword by Archie Green
This new book tells-for the first time-the story of Charlie Bowman, a musician from East Tennessee, who was a major influence on the distinctive fiddle style definitive of country music of the 1920s and 1930s.
Read more
Jook Right On
Blues Stories and Blues Storytellers
Barry Lee Pearson
“Jook Right On could possibly produce the same kind of blues revival 2000s that Charter’s work did almost fifty years earlier.” —Bruce Conforth, Journal of Folklore Research “Pearson has collected a gold mine of compelling tales, organized them with convincing logic, and introduced them with the kind of penetrating insight and professional modesty that any blues scholar might do well to emulate.”
—Adam Gussow, author of Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition and Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York
Podcasts- Listen to interviews from Jook Right On
Read more
Other UT Press titles on music tradition and culture
African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions
Black Hymnody: A Hymnological History of the African-American Church
Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays
Charles Faulkner Bryan: His Life and Music
A Companion to The New Harp of Columbia
Deford Bailey: A Black Star in Early Country Music
Folk Songs of Middle Tennessee: The George Boswell Collection
A Hot-Bed of Musicians: Traditional Music in the Upper New River Valley–Whitetop Region
The Encyclopedia of Appalachia won the prestigious W. D. Weatherford Award at the 30th annual Appalachian Studies Association conference hosted this year by Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee.
Presented annually by the Appalachian Studies Association and Berea College, the award honors selected published works that “best illuminate the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.”
“The press is pleased to have been a part of this collaborative project with the Center for Appalachian Studies and Services at East Tennessee State University,” said Jennifer Siler, director of the University of Tennessee Press. “The Encyclopedia of Appalachia is an important reference, and it will serve the residents of the area as well as researchers and students of Appalachian history, culture, and heritage for many years to come.”
This is the fifth Weatherford Award presented to a book published by the University of Tennessee Press.
RECENT ACCOLADES FOR UT PRESS AUTHORS:
ABBOTT LOWELL CUMMINGS AWARD
Two Carpenters
Architecture and Building in Early New England, 1799-1859
J. Ritchie Garrison
HARRY CAUDILL AWARD
Under the Workers’ Caps
From Champion Mill to Blue Ridge Paper by George W. Loveland
George W. Loveland
JAMES MOONEY PRIZE
No Space Hidden
The Spirit of African American Yard Work
Grey Gundaker and Judith McWillie
SOUTHERN LITERATURE AS WE KNOW IT TODAY—and who does not know it?—caught the imagination of the nation in the 1920’s with the Southern Renaissance, led by the young gentlemen poets, the Fugitives, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and the young college dropout in a tiny town in Mississippi, William Faulkner, whose novel Sanctuary became notorious.
By the end of World War II, poets, playwrights, and fiction writers—Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Evelyn Scott, Thomas Wolfe, James Agee, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Shelby Foote, Peter Taylor, Faulkner, Lillian Hellman, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neal Hurston—had made readers throughout America and abroad well acquainted with the major distinctive characteristics of life in the South throughout its history and the artistic techniques they employed, especially in style.
The familiar elements of Southern literature are the landscape and the people, “characters,” who live on it, their food, religion, music, politics, folkways, their sometimes bizarre behavior, even in the New Millennium—and, obviously, the language, not just dialect and colloquialisms in dialogue but imaginative phrasing in narration, a sense that the writer’s love of language is the very air he or she breathes. Innovative techniques distinguish the masters—Faulkner, for instance—from northern masters such as Fitzgerald.
Within the past half century, new writers have reinvigorated those elements and techniques, stars bright in the Southern literary galaxy: Barry Hannah, Lee Smith, Harper Lee, Allen Wier, Ernest Gaines, Cormac McCarthy, Reynolds Price, Ralph Ellison, John Barth, William Goyen, Alice Walker.
Compared with any other part of the nation throughout its history, the South as a place of literary ferment stands out monumentally. Oh, yes, there was the New England Renaissance made famous with lasting effect upon American writers of all regions—including the South–by Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville. But that literary event was confined mostly to one state, Massachusetts, and its time span was much shorter, its achievements more philosophical, and its aesthetics less innovative, especially in style.
Soon after the waning of the New England Renaissance, Southern literature began to flower in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans.
Great writers—Wharton, James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald—have come out of the North—New York, the Midwest—but they did not set out to express the character and spirit of those regions. There is no Northern literature as such. There is no such thing as northerners, except in the minds of Southerners; however, southerners are considered such by both the North and the South.
Consider these controversial pronouncements: All southern literature is about the Civil War, as enhanced by Antebellum and Reconstruction eras. Only a Southerner can write the Great Civil War novel and thus the Great American novel.
Internationally, one may take notice of the rise of a national literature, as in nineteenth-century Germany, but no region, north or south, of any nation has caught the imagination of the world as the American South has.
Of course, there is no such thing as THE SOUTH. There are many Souths, and within each Southern state there is a distinctive cultural and literary North-South divide, except for a few, such as Kentucky and Tennessee, in which west, middle, and east have produced very different writers.
And we really must stop referring to the literature of Appalachian states below Pennsylvania as Southern Appalachian literature, and consider referring to all writing out of Appalachia, from Maine to Georgia, as Appalachian Mountain literature.
Evelyn Scott is a recently rediscovered writer in all genres. As Southern literature adapts to and affects the ways of the rest of the world, we do well to search out other forgotten Southern writers and to hope that books about them will open our eyes over the coming years.—David Madden
Other titles of interest:
Appalachia and Beyond: Conversations with Writers from the Mountain South
Reading Faulkner: Introductions to the First Thirteen Novels
Ghostly Parallels: Robert Penn Warren and the Lyric Poetic Sequence
Robert Penn Warren’s Circus Aesthetic and the Southern Renaissance
Robert Penn Warren, Critic
David Madden: A Writer for All Genres
The Napkin Manuscripts
James Agee: Selected Journalism
James Agee: Reconsiderations
James Agee Rediscovered
Unwelcome Voices: Subversive Fiction in the Antebellum South
Shelby Foote and the Art of History
Flannery O’Connor
A Little Fling
The Last Book
“This is, to my knowledge, the first full-length treatment of complexion legends and myths, filling a major gap in the literature. . . . It treats controversial issues with great sensitivity and insight.”
—Nancy Bonvillain, Simon’s Rock College of Bard
The only attempt to document rumor and legends relating to complexion in black communities, The Paper Bag Principle looks at the divide that has existed between the black elite and the black “folk.”
While a few studies have dealt with complexion consciousness in black communities, there has, to date, been no study that has catalogued how the belief systems of members of a black community have influenced the shaping of its institutions, organizations, and neighborhoods. Audrey Kerr examines how these folk beliefs—exemplified by the infamous “paper bag tests”—inform color discrimination intraracially.
Kerr argues that proximity to whiteness (in hue) and wealth have helped create two black Washingtons and that the black community, at various times in history, replicated “Jim Crowism” internally to create some standard of exceptionalism in education and social organization.
The Paper Bag Principle focuses on three objectives: to record lore related to the “paper bag principle” (the set of attitudes that granted blacks with light skin higher status in black communities); to investigate the impact that this “principle” has had on the development of black community consciousness; and to link this material to power that results from proximity to whiteness.
Other titles of interest:
Maxine Smith’s Unwilling Pupils: Lessons Learned in Memphis’s Civil Rights Classroom (forthcoming March 2007)
Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York (forthcoming June 2007)
Inventing Black Women (forthcoming July 2007)
Sutton E. Griggs and the Struggle against White Supremacy (forthcoming July 2007)
George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative
Little X: Growing Up in the Nation of Islam
Jook Right On: Blues Stories and Blues Storytellers
The Civil Rights Movement in Tennessee
The Letters of Jean Toomer
Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman
|
The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C. Add to Cart |
In sixteen thoroughly engaging essays, naturalist Stephen Lyn Bales ventures far and wide among the richly diverse flora and fauna of his native Tennessee Valley. Whether describing the nocturnal habits of the elusive whip-poor-will, the pivotal role the hedge plant Osage orange played in a key Civil War battle, or the political firestorm that attended the discovery of a tiny fish dubbed the snail darter, Bales illuminates in surprising ways the complicated and often vexed relationships between humans and their neighbors in the natural world.
Accompanied by the author’s striking line drawings, each chapter in Natural Histories showcases a particular animal or plant and each narrative begins or ends in, or passes through the Tennessee Valley. Along the way, historical episodes both familiar and obscure-the de Soto explorations, the saga of the Lost State of Franklin, the devastation of the Trail of Tears, and the planting of a “Moon Tree” at Sycamore Shoals in Elizabethton-are brought vividly to life. Bales also highlights the work of present-day environmentalists and scientists such as the dedicated staffers of the Tennessee-based American Eagle Foundation, whose efforts have helped save the endangered raptors and reintroduce them to the wild.
Arranged according to the seasonal cycles of the valley, Bales’s essays reveal the balance that nature has achieved over millions of years, contrasting it with the messier business of human endeavor, especially the desire to turn nature into a commodity, something to be subdued and harvested. Filled with delightful twists and turns, Natural Histories is also a book brimming with important lessons for us all.
|
Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley Add to Cart |
Thirteen states between (and including) parts of New York and Mississippi constitute the enigmatic Appalachian region—home to the beautiful mountain system that shares its name. It is a region that has produced some of the most talented writers, gifted artisans, and richest lore in the world. The University of Tennessee Press is pleased to be the publisher of many books that celebrate this very special place. This holiday season we showcase some of our most recent releases in Appalachian studies. UT Press—at the corner of Appalachia and the world.
|
|
Encyclopedia of Appalachia Edited by Rudy Abramson and Jean Haskell The one-stop indispensable guide to Appalachia’s rich history and unique culture. |
|
A Handbook to Appalachia An Introduction to the Region Edited by Grace Toney Edwards, JoAnn Aust Asbury, and Ricky L. Cox An overview of Appalachia’s history, culture, people, literature, religion, and much more. An excellent companion to the Encyclopedia of Appalachia. |
 |
Appalachia and Beyond Converstions with Writers from the Mountain South Edited by John Lang Conversations with Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan, Lee Smith, Mary Lee Settle, Charles Wright, and many more. |
Blood Kin grew out of a single image, a man walking home along a dirt road, combined with the stories of the brothers of my maternal grandfather, each of whom seemed to live a life touched deeply by the tragedies of the twentieth century.
At some point, probably further back than I’d care to recall, I became fixated on the suffering of others, and, more than that, how they dealt with suffering and loss. Blood Kin is my attempt to chart the lives of a family sundered by war, addiction, and disillusionment. That, of course, sounds terribly depressing. But I hope there is something redeeming in the human insistence of struggling in the face of what often seems if not cosmic malevolence, then at least cosmic indifference. I’ve known so many families for whom, like the Burdens, family, place, and faith are cornerstones of life. Often elusive, but ever-present. I hope I have done some measure of justice to those on whom this book is (loosely) based. —Mark Powell
|
Blood Kin Add to Cart |
Bad Behavior has blocked 113 access attempts in the last 7 days.
