Media-Made Dixie
The South in the American Imagination
Title Details
Pages: 240
Illustrations: 19 b&w photos
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 01/13/2004
ISBN: 9-780-8203-2388-6
List Price: $26.95
Media-Made Dixie
The South in the American Imagination
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- Description
- Reviews
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.
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