Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination - Softcover

Kirby, Jack Temple

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820323888 ISBN 13: 9780820323886

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2004

Synopsis

In Media-Made Dixie Jack Kirby shows how the American public’s perceptions of the South have been influenced, even controlled, by the mass communications media. In this newly updated edition, Kirby surveys major movies, radio and television shows, plays, popular histories, and music from the turn of the century through the 1980s. He documents a progression in the national image of the South from the cracker wasteland of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre to the antebellum wonderland of Hollywood’s Shirley Temple-“Bojangles” Robinson musicals; from William Styron’s searching account of the Old South in Confessions of Nat Turner to the New South ingenuity of Jimmy Carter and Ted Turner; and from the regressive back-roads of television’s The Dukes of Hazzard to the complex reconciliation found in Alice Walker’s and Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple.

About this title

About the Author:

JACK TEMPLE KIRBY was the emeritus W. E. Smith Professor of American History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His most recent books include Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture and The Countercultural South (Georgia).

Review:

Anybody who is even faintly curious about the South should be grateful for Kirby’s lively, unpretentious little work. . . . No major ingredient of the fictive-fantasy South is left unscrutinized.

(Time Magazine)

Entertaining and provocative.

(Mid-America)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0820323888
• ISBN 13: 9780820323886
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240