Games of Property

Thadious M. Davis is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled and Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context. She is the coeditor of Satire or Evasion?: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn, published by Duke University Press.

“Every now and then, a book comes along that takes us utterly by surprise, reconfiguring old geographies of criticism with originality, power, and brilliance. Thadious M. Davis has produced just such a book. We (and William Faulkner!) are blessed by her attention to race, property, agency, game theory, and critical legal studies. Yoknapatawpha and its creator find radically new use value for a new millennium in Davis’s labors, and we are all gifted with beautifully written scholarship, and an indispensable pedagogical meditation. Davis’s ‘Book of Moses’ is must reading.”-Houston A. Baker, Jr., author of Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-reading Booker T. ”From the opening lines, we are in the presence of an original and powerful voice that expands the boundaries of the field of ‘law and literature’ and offers a fresh way of understanding one of William Faulkner’s most elliptical texts.”-Linda K. Kerber, May Brodbeck Professor of History, University of Iowa ”It may sound hyperbolic to claim that nothing like this exists in Faulkner scholarship, but that’s my claim. Games of Property contributes to a new understanding of not only Go Down, Moses, but of much of Faulkner’s work.”-Linda Wagner-Martin, Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Illustrations viiiAcknowledgments xIntroduction: The Game of Genre 11. The Game of Challenge432. The Object of Property 773. The Game of Boundaries1194. The Subject of Property 1745. Conclusion: The Game of Compensation 223Notes 263Bibliography 309Index 330