Brannon Costello
Associate Professor
E-mail: bcostell@lsu.edu
Area of Interest
Southern literature, U.S. literature, comics and graphic novels.
Robert Udick Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.
Selected Publications
Authored Book:
Plantation Airs: Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction, 1945-1971. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2007.
Edited Collections:
Howard Chaykin: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
Comics and the U.S. South. With Qiana Whitted (University of South Carolina.) Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.
Essays:
“'America Makes Strange Jews': Superheroes and Jewish Masculinity in Howard Chaykin's Dominic Fortune." Visualizing Jewish Narrative: Essays on Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels. Ed. Derek Parker Royal. Purdue UP. Forthcoming.
"Fascism and Mass Culture in Howard Chaykin's Blackhawk." ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. Forthcoming 2014.
"Reimagining Mississippi in Jujitsu for Christ: Civil Rights, Southern Literature, and Speculative Fictions." Critical Afterword to new edition of Jujitsu for Christ (1986) by Jack Butler. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2013. 191-209.
“The Futurama Isn't What It Used to Be: Embodiment and the 'Real Thing' in Howard Chaykin's Time2." International Journal of Comic Art 14.2 (2012): 1-22.
"Southern Super-Patriots and U.S. Nationalism: Race, Region, and Nation in Captain America." Comics and the U.S. South. Ed. Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. 62-88.
“An Afternoon with Howard Chaykin.” (Interview) Howard Chaykin: Conversations. Ed. Brannon Costello. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2011. 250-288.
"Randall Kenan beyond the Final Frontier: Science Fiction, Superheroes, and the South in A Visitation of Spirits." Southern Literary Journal (2010).
"Third Spaces and First Places: Jack Butler's Jujitsu for Christ and Southern Hybridity." Mississippi Quarterly (2005 [2007)].
"An Interview with Jack Butler." Mississippi Quarterly (2005 [2007]).
"Playing Lady and Imitating Aristocrats: Race, Class, and Money in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding and The Ponder Heart." Southern Quarterly (2004).
"Poor White Trash, Great White Hope: Race, Class, and the (De) Construction of Whiteness in Lewis Nordon's (Wolf Whistle)," Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2004).
Richard Wright's Lawd Today! And the Political Uses of Modernism." African American Review (2003); reprinted in Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Richard Wright (2009).
"Working' Towards a Sense of Agency: Determinism in The Wings of the Dove." Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays in American Literary Naturalism (2003).
"Hybridity and Racial Identity in Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman." Mississippi Quarterly (2001-02)