Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination

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.

Author: Jack Temple Kirby
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 01/13/2004
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.86lbs
Size: 9.12h x 6.22w x 0.64d
ISBN: 9780820323886

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).