From the southern influence on nineteenth-century New York to the musical legacy of late-twentieth-century Athens, Georgia, to the cutting-edge cuisines of twenty-first-century Asheville, North Carolina, the bohemian South has long contested traditional views of the region. Yet, even as the fruits of this creative South have famously been celebrated, exported, and expropriated, the region long was labeled a cultural backwater. This timely and illuminating collection uses bohemia as a novel lens for reconsidering more traditional views of the South. Exploring wide-ranging locales, such as Athens, Austin, Black Mountain College, Knoxville, Memphis, New Orleans, and North Carolina's Research Triangle, each essay challenges popular interpretations of the South, while highlighting important bohemian sub- and countercultures. In addition to tracing the historical legacy of southern bohemians, the collection traverses such contemporary issues as contested memory, the commodification of the bohemian South, and how southern bohemians play with traditions in new ways that compliment, contradict, and commingle with the region's past traditional practices and ideas. The Bohemian South provides an important perspective in the New South as an epicenter for progress, innovation, and experimentation. Contributors include Scott Barretta, Shawn Chandler Bingham, Jaime Cantrell, Jon Horne Carter, Alex Sayf Cummings, Lindsey A. Freeman, Grace E. Hale, Joanna Levin, Joshua Long, Daniel S. Margolies, Chris Offutt, Zandria F. Robinson, Allen Shelton, Daniel Cross Turner, Zackary Vernon, and Edward Whitley.

Thoreau and the Sociological Imagination: The Wilds of Society is the first in-depth sociological examination of the ideas of Henry David Thoreau. Through explorations of Thoreau's intellectual links to early social thinkers, as well as the mainstay Thoreauvian concerns for the individual-society relationship, social change, and deconstructing society's idea of progress, Bingham illustrates the sophistication of Thoreau's sociological imagination challenging readers to re-examine the disciplinary boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities.

From the southern influence on nineteenth-century New York to the musical legacy of late-twentieth-century Athens, Georgia, to the cutting-edge cuisines of twenty-first-century Asheville, North Carolina, the bohemian South has long contested traditional views of the region. Yet, even as the fruits of this creative South have famously been celebrated, exported, and expropriated, the region long was labeled a cultural backwater. This timely and illuminating collection uses bohemia as a novel lens for reconsidering more traditional views of the South. Exploring wide-ranging locales, such as Athens, Austin, Black Mountain College, Knoxville, Memphis, New Orleans, and North Carolina's Research Triangle, each essay challenges popular interpretations of the South, while highlighting important bohemian sub- and countercultures. In addition to tracing the historical legacy of southern bohemians, the collection traverses such contemporary issues as contested memory, the commodification of the bohemian South, and how southern bohemians play with traditions in new ways that compliment, contradict, and commingle with the region's past traditional practices and ideas. The Bohemian South provides an important perspective in the New South as an epicenter for progress, innovation, and experimentation. Contributors include Scott Barretta, Shawn Chandler Bingham, Jaime Cantrell, Jon Horne Carter, Alex Sayf Cummings, Lindsey A. Freeman, Grace E. Hale, Joanna Levin, Joshua Long, Daniel S. Margolies, Chris Offutt, Zandria F. Robinson, Allen Shelton, Daniel Cross Turner, Zackary Vernon, and Edward Whitley.

Exploring a paradox, Shawn Bingham and Sara Green show how humor has been used both to challenge traditional views of disability and to reinforce negative stereotypes and social inequalities. Seriously Funny ranges from ancient Greek dramas to medieval court jesters to contemporary comedy, from stage performances to the experiences of daily life. Rich with insights into issues of identity and social stratification, it offers an eye-opening perspective on attitudes toward disability across the ages.

From novelists to political cartoonists, artists have long brought a unique perspective to important public discussions of social and political issues. Yet, fury and debate over the role of the artist has resulted in blacklisting, banning, and symbolically burning artists who use their work as a means of social critique and social change. The Art of Social Critique makes a case for the complexity of artistic ways of "seeing" social life - observing, analyzing and portraying society - by examining the interdisciplinary nature of imagination. The authors cover a range of novelists, painters, musicians, cartoonists, poets and others whose explorations of the human condition directly connect to complex methods of social inquiry often associated with other disciplines. Specific parallels are drawn between the social sciences and the theories, lenses, and aesthetics that allow these artists to gain a clearer view of social life. Artistic techniques, such as metaphor, caricature, and irony, are examined as unique methods of social inquiry, while the novelist and poet become ethnographers of social life. By treading the common ground between the arts, humanities and social sciences, The Art of Social Critique raises a number of important questions about the role of art in society: What are the relationships between imagination, creativity, perspective, experimentation and unveiling social life? How does the artistic perspective engage in representation, give voice, or unveil? How have artists examined the relationship between the individual and society, social structures, or social norms that we take for granted? Each chapter explores how the "artistic eye," as a form of qualitative social inquiry, helps both the artist and the audience arrive at a more complex understanding of society. From art as a social movement to the important relationship between art and collective memory, The Art of Social Critique covers imagination as an interdisciplinary concept that draws on the sociological, psychological, historical, and political. Together these essays reveal art as more than mere entertainment or amusement - it is an interdisciplinary way of knowing our social world.

Thoreau and the Sociological Imagination: The Wilds of Society is the first in-depth sociological examination of the ideas of Henry David Thoreau. Through explorations of Thoreau's intellectual links to early social thinkers, as well as the mainstay Thoreauvian concerns for the individual-society relationship, social change, and deconstructing society's idea of progress, Bingham illustrates the sophistication of Thoreau's sociological imagination challenging readers to re-examine the disciplinary boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities.