Book Review: The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 18: Media, edited by Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith

Abstract

New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 18: Media. Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith, eds. Charles Reagan Wilson, series ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 464 pp. $47.50 hbk. $26.95 pbk.For those of us who refer often to Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, published in 1989, a more extensive and updated multivolume set is long awaited. University of North Carolina Press and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi have collaborated again to produce twenty-four new volumes that deal with everything from education to urbanization in the South.The eighteenth volume of the series, Media, is of particular interest to readers of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, although other titles are relevant to interdisciplinary study as well. nineteen volumes published to date, in order, include religion; geography; history; myth, manners, and memory; language; ethnicity; foodways; environment; literature; law and politics; agriculture and industry; music; gender; folklife; urbanization; sports and recreation; education; media; and violence.The 464-page Media volume replaces the previous encyclopedia section that included fewer than one hundred pages about the topic. Some of the entries are significantly updated (e.g., magazines and newspapers, both by journalism historian Sam G. Riley); some are slightly updated, often with the assistance of other scholars (e.g., The Birth of a Nation by Joan L. Silverman); and some are entirely new (e.g., topics such as Cable News Network, James Carville, the Coen brothers, Stephen Colbert, Pat Conroy, Horton Foote, Morgan Freeman, John Grisham, Spike Lee, Carson McCullers and Film, and Oprah Winfrey). Volume editors are Allison Graham, a professor of communication and media studies at the University of Memphis, and Sharon Monteith, a professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham.The strength of the volume is its expansiveness and (with rare exception) its accuracy and careful proofreading. Its weaknesses include (1) an emphasis on film, media celebrities, and popular television programming, often to the near exclusion of broadcast news organizations, magazines, newspapers, and online sites that focus, among other topics, on extended nonfiction writing; (2) recycled bibliographic lists from the earlier encyclopedia; and (3) reliance on scholars in geography, literature, sociology, and other fields without a similar emphasis on well-known scholars in journalism and media studies.Many JMCQ readers conduct interdisciplinary research and have achieved academic degrees in a variety of fields, but most of us understand the irreplaceable perspective provided by media historians and others who focus on media industries. Fortunately, media scholars from the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Memphis; film reviewers such as John Beifuss of the Memphis Commercial Appeal; and culture, film, and media scholars at the University of Nottingham are included in the landmark encyclopedia.Generally, the academic affiliations of the editors and invited contributors outside media studies help to explain the emphasis on film, literature, and media celebrities. Scholars in ethnic studies, gender studies, literature, sociology, and other academic disciplines often teach courses and conduct excellent research in these areas of inquiry. However, for those interested in the contributions that media experts make to the volume Media, it is important to note E. Culpepper Clark of the University of Georgia, Michael Fuhlhage and Lucila Vargas of UNC-Chapel Hill, Thomas J. Hrach of the University of Memphis, Kathleen WoodruffWickham of the University of Mississippi, Lurene Cachola Kelley of the University of Memphis, Sam G. …