Ann J. Abadie - Böcker

In these stimulating papers from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in 1985, feminism and Faulkner studies collide, with beneficial results for each.The disruptive and disturbing characterization of women in Faulkner's fictional world and the influence of actual women in the novelist's life are given attentive study in these papers. The contributors to this collection consider questions debated for many decades in Faulkner studies and those recently raised to prominence under the illuminating ray of feminist criticism.""There is throughout Faulkner something disturbing,"" Noel Polk observes, ""about the comprehensiveness with which women in his work are associated with blood and excrement and filth and death.

In 1944, William Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley, ""I'm telling the same story over and over which is myself and the world. That's all a writer ever does, he tells his own biography in a thousand different terms.""With these words, Faulkner suggests that what changes in the course of his prolific novel-writing career is not so much the content but the style, ""the thousand different terms"" of his fiction. The essays in Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction, first presented at the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi, focus on Faulkner's narrative inventiveness, on how Faulkner, like his character Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, relentlessly kept ""trying to say.""The contributors, authorities on Faulkner's narrative, offer a wide variety of critical approaches to Faulkner's fiction-writing process. Cleanth Brooks, for example, applies the strategies of New Criticism to Faulkner's rendering of the heroic and pastoral modes; Judith L. Sensibar attempts to locate biographical sources for repeated Faulknerian paradigms; and Philip M. Weinstein draws on the theories of the Marxist Althusser and the French psychoanalyst Lacan. The topics examined are similarly wide-ranging.

The works of William Faulkner are charged with elements of such great diversity that they are an almost inexhaustible resource for study and analysis. One of the most diverse is the subject of this fascinating volume.However alien Faulkner professed popular culture to be to his conception of art and taste, his works are imbued with its inescapable influence. The relationship between Faulkner, a novelist not known for public accessibility, and the culture of the masses makes this an exceptional volume indeed. That the author of dense, riddling novels like The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and other works associated with high modernist art could also appeal to the popular tastes and be influenced by popular culture is a phenomenon made evident in this collection of essays.Faulkner's works reveal that he was drawn to popular culture repeatedly and that this ""lowbrow art"" provided material for his works and for his livelihood. His attempt to write a novel with wide appeal is represented in Sanctuary. His numerous associations with Hollywood and scriptwriting and his publishing stories in popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post pushed Faulkner to modify his literary modernism to the demands of a wider audience.

Since its beginnings in the 1920s, country music has soared beyond an almost exclusively regional audience to become America's most popular form in the 1990s. Seventy years of regional modernization have framed it for broad appeal in today's popular culture.Here is a fascinating book that offers perspective on contemporary country music's stars, promoters, and fans. It probes deeply to learn how a vibrant country music culture evolved from rustic radio programs to become aggressive promotion of recording artists and an extended network of performers and fans unparalleled in other forms of popular music.Drawing upon a remarkably diverse range of sources--literary and scholarly works, fan magazines and music business publications, biographies of country music stars, recordings, radio and television programs, and motion pictures--Country Music Culture is based on firsthand observations of more than seventy-five live concerts and public events. It provides impressive evidence of the boundless devotion an immense audience extends to its favorite music, a music that defines the culture that produced it.

The recent spatial turn in social theory and cultural studies opens up exciting new possibilities for the study of William Faulkner's literature. The fictional domains of Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson, Mississippi, are not simply imagined communities but imaginative geographies of remarkable complexity and detail, as evidenced by the maps Faulkner created of his ""apocryphal"" county. Exploring the diverse functions of space in Faulkner's artistic vision, the eleven essays in Faulkner's Geographies delve deep into Yoknapatawpha but also reach beyond it, to uncover unsuspected connections and flows linking local, regional, national, hemispheric, and global geographies in Faulkner's writings. Individual contributions examine the influence of the plantation as a land-use regime on Faulkner's imagination of north Mississippi's geography; the emergence of ""micro-Souths"" as a product of modern migratory patterns in the urban North of Faulkner's fiction; the enlistment of the author's work in the geopolitics of the cultural Cold War during the 1950s; the historical and literary affiliations between Faulkner's Deep South and Greater Mexico; the local and idiosyncratic as alternatives to region and nation; the unique intersection of regional and metropolitan geographies that Faulkner encountered as a novice writer immersed in the literary culture of New Orleans; the uses of feminist geography to trace the interplay of gender, space, and movement; and the circulation of Caribbean and ""Black South"" spaces and itineraries through Faulkner's masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom!By bringing new attention to the function of space, place, mapping, and movement in his literature, Faulkner's Geographies seeks to redraw the very boundaries of Faulkner studies.

These essays examine issues across the wide arc of Faulkner's extraordinary career, from his aesthetic apprenticeship in the visual arts, to late-career engagements with the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and beyond, to the place of death in his artistic vision and the long, varied afterlives he and his writings have enjoyed in literature and popular culture. Contributors deliver stimulating reassessments of Faulkner's first novel, Soldiers' Pay; his final novel, The Reivers; and much of the important work between. Scholars explore how a broad range of elite and lowbrow cultural forms--plantation diaries, phonograph records, pulp magazines--shaped Faulkner's capacious imagination and how his works were translated into such media as film and modern dance. Essays place Faulkner's writings in dialogue with those of such fellow twentieth-century authors as W. E. B. Du Bois, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Hall, and Jayne Anne Phillips; locate his work in relation to African American intellectual currents and Global South artistic traditions; and weigh the rewards as well as the risks of dislodging Faulkner from the canonical position he currently occupies.While Faulkner studies has cultivated an image of the novelist as a neglected genius who toiled in obscurity, a look back fifty years to the final months of the author's life reveals a widely traveled and celebrated artist whose significance was framed in national and international as well as regional terms. Fifty Years after Faulkner bears out that expansive view, reintroducing us to a writer whose work retains its ability to provoke, intrigue, and surprise a variety of readerships.

Considering that he worked a stint as a screen writer, it will come as little surprise that Faulkner has often been called the most cinematic of novelists. Faulkner's novels were produced in the same high period as the films of classical Hollywood, a reason itself for considering his work alongside this dominant form. Beyond their era, though, Faulkner's novels - or the ways in which they ask readers to see as well as feel his world - have much in common with film. That Faulkner was aware of film and that his novels' own ""thinking"" betrays his profound sense of the medium and its effects broadens the contexts in which he can be considered.In a range of approaches, the contributors consider Faulkner's career as a scenarist and collaborator in Hollywood, the ways his screenplay work and the adaptations of his fiction informed his literary writing, and how Faulkner's craft anticipates, intersects with, or reflects upon changes in cultural history across the lifespan of cinema.Drawing on film history, critical theory, archival studies of Faulkner's screenplays and scholarship about his work in Hollywood, the nine essays show a keen awareness of literary modernism and its relation to film.

The recent spatial turn in social theory and cultural studies opens up exciting new possibilities for the study of William Faulkner’s literature. The fictional domains of Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson, Mississippi, are not simply imagined communities but imaginative geographies of remarkable complexity and detail, as evidenced by the maps Faulkner created of his “apocryphal” county. Exploring the diverse functions of space in Faulkner’s artistic vision, the eleven essays in Faulkner’s Geographies delve deep into Yoknapatawpha but also reach beyond it, to uncover unsuspected connections and flows linking local, regional, national, hemispheric, and global geographies in Faulkner’s writings. Individual contributions examine the influence of the plantation as a land-use regime on Faulkner’s imagination of north Mississippi’s geography; the emergence of “micro-Souths” as a product of modern migratory patterns in the urban North of Faulkner’s fiction; the enlistment of the author’s work in the geopolitics of the cultural Cold War during the 1950s; the historical and literary affiliations between Faulkner’s Deep South and Greater Mexico; the local and idiosyncratic as alternatives to region and nation; the unique intersection of regional and metropolitan geographies that Faulkner encountered as a novice writer immersed in the literary culture of New Orleans; the uses of feminist geography to trace the interplay of gender, space, and movement; and the circulation of Caribbean and “Black South” spaces and itineraries through Faulkner’s masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom!By bringing new attention to the function of space, place, mapping, and movement in his literature, Faulkner’s Geographies seeks to redraw the very boundaries of Faulkner studies.

Essays by Susan V. Donaldson, Lael Gold, Adam Gussow, Martin Kreiswirth, Jay Parini, Noel Polk, Judith L. Sensibar, Jon Smith, and Priscilla Wald William Faulkner once said that the writer ""collects his material all his life from everything he reads, from everything he listens to, everything he sees, and he stores that away in sort of a filing cabinet . . . in my case it's not anything near as neat as a filing case; it's more like a junk box."" Faulkner tended to be quite casual about his influences. For example, he referred to the South as ""not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don't have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time."" His Christian background, according to him, was simply another tool he might pick up on one of his visits to ""the lumber room"" that would help him tell a story.Sometimes he claimed he never read James Joyce's Ulysses or had never heard of Thomas Mann--writers he would elsewhere declare as ""the two great men in my time."" Sometimes he expressed annoyance at readers who found esoteric theory in his fiction, when all he wanted them to find was Faulkner: ""I have never read [Freud]. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby-Dick didn't.""Nevertheless, Faulkner's life was rich in what he did, saw, and read, and he seems to have remembered all of it and put it to use in his fiction. Faulkner's Inheritance is a collection of essays that examines the influences on Faulkner's fiction, including his own family history, Jim Crow laws, contemporary fashion, popular culture, and literature.

Contributions by Deborah N. Cohn, Leigh Anne Duck, Robert W. Hamblin, Michael Kreyling, Barbara Ladd, Walter Benn Michaels, Patrick O’Donnell, Theresa M. Towner, Annette Trefzer, and Karl F. Zender.Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century presents the thoughts of ten noted Faulkner scholars who spoke at the twenty-seventh annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi. Theresa M. Towner attacks the traditional classification of Faulkner’s works as “major” and “minor” and argues that this causes the neglect of other significant works and characters. Michael Kreyling uses photographs of Faulkner to analyze the interrelationships of Faulkner’s texts with the politics and culture of Mississippi.Barbara Ladd and Deborah Cohn invoke the relevance of Faulkner’s works to “the other South,” postcolonial Latin America. Also, approaching Faulkner from a postcolonial perspective, Annette Trefzer looks at his contradictory treatment of Native Americans.Within the tragic fates of such characters as Quentin Compson, Gail Hightower, and Rosa Coldfield, Leigh Ann Duck finds an inability to cope with painful memories. Patrick O’Donnell examines the use of the future tense and Faulkner’s growing skepticism of history as a linear progression. To postmodern critics who denigrate “The Fire and the Hearth,” Karl F. Zender offers a rebuttal. Walter Benn Michaels contends that in Faulkner’s South, and indeed the United States as a whole, the question of racial identification tends to overpower all other issues. Faulkner’s recurring interest in frontier life and values inspires Robert W. Hamblin’s piece.

Contributions by Megan Abbott, Michael Almereyda, Kris Belden-Adams, Maude Schuyler Clay, William Dunlap, W. Ralph Eubanks, William Ferris, Marti A. Funke, Lisa Howorth, Amanda Malloy, Richard McCabe, Emily Ballew Neff, Robert Saarnio, and Anne Wilkes TuckerThe Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston is an examination of the life and work of the artist widely considered to be the father of color photography. William Eggleston was born in 1939 and grew up in the Mississippi Delta town of Sumner. His innovative 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York helped establish color photography as an artistic medium and has inspired photographers and artists around the world.Edited by Ann J. Abadie, the catalog contains fifty-five Eggleston photographs, thirty-six that were featured in The Beautiful Mysterious exhibition at the University of Mississippi Museum from September 2016 to February 2017. Eggleston's longtime friend William Ferris, a celebrated folklorist, donated all the photographs to the Museum. The photographs range from 1962 into the 1980s, representing each of Eggleston's projects during that time. Some of the photographs are inscribed with Eggleston's rare handwritten notes about location, people, dates, and projects. Eight of Eggleston's early dye transfers are in the collection. Many of these works had not been on public display before this exhibition, including black-and-white images that are unique-copy single prints.This is a penetrating examination of the influence of the Mississippi Delta and the American South on Eggleston's work and of Eggleston's influence on photography and other creative fields.

Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Michael P. Bibler, Deborah Clarke, David A. Davis, David M. Earle, Jason D. Fichtel, Elizabeth Fielder, Joseph Fruscione, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Patrick E. Horn, Cheryl Lester, Jessica Martell, Sharon Monteith, Richard C. Moreland, Alan Nadel, Julie Beth Napolin, François Pitavy, Ramón Saldívar, Hortense J. Spillers, Terrell L. Tebbetts, Zackary Vernon, Randall Wilhelm, and Charles Reagan Wilson These essays examine issues across the wide arc of Faulkner's extraordinary career, from his aesthetic apprenticeship in the visual arts, to late-career engagements with the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and beyond, to the place of death in his artistic vision and the long, varied afterlives he and his writings have enjoyed in literature and popular culture. Contributors deliver stimulating reassessments of Faulkner's first novel, Soldiers' Pay; his final novel, The Reivers; and much of the important work between. Scholars explore how a broad range of elite and lowbrow cultural forms - plantation diaries, phonograph records, pulp magazines - shaped Faulkner's capacious imagination and how his works were translated into such media as film and modern dance. Essays place Faulkner's writings in dialogue with those of fellow twentieth-century authors including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Hall, and Jayne Anne Phillips; locate his work in relation to African American intellectual currents and Global South artistic traditions; and weigh the rewards as well as the risks of dislodging Faulkner from the canonical position he currently occupies.While Faulkner studies has cultivated an image of the novelist as a neglected genius who toiled in obscurity, a look back fifty years to the final months of the author's life reveals a widely traveled and celebrated artist whose significance was framed in national and international as well as regional terms. Fifty Years after Faulkner bears out that expansive view, reintroducing us to a writer whose work retains its ability to provoke, intrigue, and surprise a variety of readerships.

Contributions by Hosam Aboul-Ela, Susan V. Donaldson, Richard Godden, Michael Gorra, Lisa Hinrichsen, Donald M. Kartiganer, Sarah Mahurin, Sean McCann, Noel Polk, Esther Sánchez-Pardo, Annette Trefzer, Rachel Watson, and Philip Weinstein Faulkner and Mystery presents a wide spectrum of compelling arguments about the role and function of mystery in William Faulkner's fiction. Twelve new essays approach the question of what can be known and what remains a secret in the narratives of the Nobel laureate. Scholars debate whether or not Faulkner's work attempts to solve mysteries or celebrate the enigmas of life and the elusiveness of truth.Scholars scrutinize Faulkner's use of the contemporary crime and detection genre as well as novels that deepen a plot rather than solve it. Several essays are dedicated to exploring the narrative strategies and ideological functions of Faulkner's take on the detective story, the classic "whodunit." Among Faulkner's novels most interested in the format of detection is Intruder in the Dust, which assumes a central role in this essay collection.Other contributors explore the thickening mysteries of racial and sexual identity, particularly the enigmatic nature of his female and African American characters. Questions of insight, cognition, and judgment in Faulkner's work are also at the center of essays that explore his storytelling techniques, plot development, and the inscrutability of language itself.

American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World is a major contemporary survey of landscapes in art and literature of the United States, especially the American South. Inspired by William Dunlap’s extraordinary landscape Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America and a collection of forty paintings and photographs by southern artists, this volume brings together artists, authors, and scholars to present new perspectives on art and literature both past and present.The volume includes art and text from artists John Alexander, Jason Bouldin, William Dunlap, Carlyle Wolfe Lee, Ke Francis, Linda Burgess, Randy Hayes; photographers Sally Mann, Ed Croom, and Huger Foote; museum directors Betsy Bradley, Jane Livingston, and Julian Rankin; and authors W. Ralph Eubanks, John Grisham, J. Richard Gruber, Jessica B. Harris, Lisa Howorth, Julia Reed, Natasha Trethewey, Curtis Wilkie, Joseph M. Pierce, and Drew Gilpin Faust. This diverse group explores major eras of American history portrayed in Dunlap’s painting, a landscape that evokes the displacement and genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the Civil War, and William Faulkner’s fiction. They examine the history of landscape art in America, connecting art with the works of major writers like William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Natasha Trethewey, and Jesmyn Ward.In eighteen new essays written during the pandemic and since the events of January 6, 2021, the essayists emphasize how the key issues Dunlap addressed in his 1987 artwork have become part of the national discourse and make his work even more vital today.

Although he belonged to an American generation of writers deeply influenced by the high modernist revolt ""against nature"" and against the self-imposed limits of realism to a palpable world, William Faulkner reveals throughout his work an abiding sensitivity to the natural world. He writes of the big woods, of animals, and of the human body as a ground of being that art and culture can neither transcend nor completely control. The eleven essays that make up this volume, including a paper written by the acclaimed novelist William Kennedy, explore the place of ""the unbuilt world"" in Faulkner's fiction. They give particular attention to the social, mythic, and economic significance of nature, to the complexity of racial identity, and to the inevitable clash of gender and sexuality. These essays were presented in 1996 as papers at the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held annually at the University of Mississippi. Included are the following: Lawrence Buell's ""Faulkner and the Claims of the Natural World""; Thomas L. McHaney's ""Oversexing the Natural World""; Theresa M. Towner's ""Color, Race, and Identity in Faulkner's Fiction""; Jay Watson's ""The Art of the Literal in Light in August""; Mary Joanne Dondlinger's ""The Matter of Race and Gender in Faulkner's Light in August""; Louise Westling's ""Sutpen's Marriage to the Dark Body of the Land""; Myra Jehlen's ""Faulkner and the Unnatural""; Diane Roberts's ""Eula, Linda, and the Death of Nature""; David H. Evans's ""'The Bear' and the Incarnation of America""; Wiley C. Prewitt, Jr.'s ""Hunting and Habitat in Yoknapatawpha""; and William Kennedy's ""Learning from Faulkner: The Obituary of Fear."" Donald M. Kartiganer, Howry Chair of Faulkner Studies in the Department of English, and Ann J. Abadie, Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, teach at the University of Mississippi.

With essays by Richard Godden, Catherine Gunther Kodat, Kathryn B. McKee, Peter Nicolaison, Charles A. Peek, Noel Polk, Hortense J. Spillers, Joseph R. Urgo, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Charles Reagan Wilson William Faulkner is Mississippi's most famous author and arguably one of the country's greatest writers. But what was his relationship with America? How did he view the nation, its traditions, its issues? In ten essays from the 1998 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner in America looks closely at the exchange between William Faulkner the writer and his national affiliation. Collectively, the essays ask which American ideas, identities, and conflicts we should associate with Mississippi's Nobel Laureate. The collection explores questions regarding Faulkner's place in American literature, his standing and esteem in literary studies, and his relation to the United States. To address such issues, the writers seek a definition of the phrase ""Faulkner in America."" One difficulty scholars wrestle with is how to deal with Mississippi's place in the union. Surely, Faulkner mused: Is Mississippi in America? When he thought about America, he thought about being left alone, about maintaining his distance. Essays in this volume look at Faulkner's views on the ""greening of American history,"" on American figures such as Thomas Jefferson, on women in American letters, and on the American dream. Authors find that the conceptually invigorating signification of the phrase ""Faulkner in America"" is, finally, provisional. Foremost in Faulkner's mind, in interviews as well as in the aesthetics of the apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County, is that whoever and whatever is in America arrived by battles won and lost, by emigration and enslavement, by choice and by compulsion. Faulkner in America occasions a rigorous examination of Faulkner's American century. Joseph R. Urgo is chair of the English department at the University of Mississippi. His books include Faulkner's Apocrypha, Novel Frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American Culture, and In the Age of Distraction, all published by University Press of Mississippi. Ann J. Abadie is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. She has co-edited Faulkner in Cultural Context, Faulkner and the Natural World and Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect, among other Faulkner volumes, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

These ten essays from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1989 at the University of Mississippi, explore the religious themes in William Faulkner's fiction. The papers published here conclude that the key to religious meaning in Faulkner may be that his texts focus not so much on God but on a human aspiration of the divine.

The international reputation and pervasive influence of William Faulkner upon world literature is the subject of the papers In this book.At the Ninth Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in August 1982 at the University of Mississippi, scholars from throughout the world convened to express their admiration for the writings of the Nobel Laureate. For this collection the papers of scholars from Chile, Italy, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Japan, Germany and the United States are assembled from this international forum to assess Faulkner and his works and to answer questions about the extent of his influence.Is Faulkner read overseas? Is he popular? Is Faulkner's ""postage stamp of native soil"" nevertheless universally accessible? As the editors of this collection conclude, ""the name of William Faulkner has become in a household word in far-distant countries."" They find in the responses from scholars representing the nine countries included at the conference that 'everywhere Faulkner was a known quantity; everywhere he was read and admired. Ultimately…Faulkner speaks to the hearts of the people of the world."" Included is a bibliographical appendix listing translations and recent foreign criticism of Faulkner's works.

Reflecting developments in Faulkner criticism, these papers delivered at the 1980 Faulkner and Yoknapatawtha Conference point the way to a new and relatively unexplored avenue of research--the study of relationships among Faulkner's seemingly distinct novels. No longer satisfied to look only at the individual work, critics are instead surveying the whole field of Faulkner's fiction. Many of the lectures collected in this volume direct attention to the full scope and range of Faulkner's fictional world, searching for, and finding, unity, harmony, and interrelationships. Some of the essays, like Ellen Douglas's ""Faulkner in Time"" and James Carothers's ""The Road to The Reivers,"" examine all of Faulkner's novels, seeking to uncover an overall design and meaning. Others trace the appearances, in work after work, of one theme or figure. Among the subjects considered in this way are Faulkner's women, his black characters, his heroes, his aristocrats, and his attitude toward death.Taken together, these essays implicitly acknowledge the appropriateness of metaphor of a cosmos for Faulkner's fictional creation. To be fully and accurately understood, each single part of Faulkner's vast system of fictional meanings, like the separate worlds in a cosmos, must be assessed in the context of the whole.

It began in the 1930s in a powerful and elegant literature arising from a seemingly improbable place, the rural, agrarian South. This literary flowering, a proliferation of Southern letters, is called the Southern Renaissance. Although the definitive history of the Southern literary renaissance has yet to be written, its leading figure, without question, was William Faulkner.Helping to define and describe this startling literary phenomenon and Faulkner's place in it are papers of eight noted scholars included in this collection. Brooks, Rubin, King, Minter, Watkins, Samway, Blackburn, and Spencer, one of the authors whose fiction is identified with the movement, focus their papers upon the philosophical and critical aspects of the Southern Renaissance.

Since the 1960s, William Faulkner, Mississippi's most famous author, has been recognized as a central figure of international modernism. But might Faulkner's fiction be understood in relation to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as well as James Joyce's Ulysses?In eleven essays from the 1999 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner and Postmodernism examines William Faulkner and his fiction in light of postmodern literature, culture, and theory. The volume explores the variety of ways Faulkner's art can be used to measure similarities and differences between modernism and postmodernism.Essays in the collection fall into three categories: those that use Faulkner's novels as a way to mark a period distinction between modernism and postmodernism, those that see postmodern tendencies in Faulkner's fiction, and those that read Faulkner through the lens of postmodern theory's contemporary legacy, the field of cultural studies.In order to make their particular arguments, essays in the collection compare Faulkner to more contemporary novelists such as Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Toni Morrison, and Kathy Acker. But not all of the comparisons are to high culture artists, since even Elvis Presley becomes Faulkner's foil in one of the essays.A variety of theoretical perspectives frame the work in this volume, from Fredric Jameson's pessimistic sense of postmodernism's possibilities to Linda Hutcheon's conviction that cultural critique can continue in postmodernism through innovative new forms such as metafiction. Despite the different theoretical premises and distinct conclusions of the individual authors of these essays, Faulkner and Postmodernism proves once again that in the key debates surrounding twentieth-century fiction, Faulkner is a crucial figure.

Readers know that humor abounds in the writings of William Faulkner, but the thousands of articles and hundreds of books about his fiction contain little commentary on Faulknerian humor. To give attention to this subject crying out for schlarly treatment, numerous aspects of Faulknerian humor were explored at the Eleventh Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference held in 1984 at the University of Mississippi. Thirteen papers presented at that conference are collected in this volume. Deploring the scholar's tendency to emphasize only Faulkner's serious themes and to neglect the humor that is a natural part of his world, the editors have collected papers showing that humor is not a separate, subordinate part of Faulkner but is indeed at the heart of his writing. The various essays find natural humor even in The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, novels which are traditionally viewed only as tragedies. The elements of Southerwestern humor, folk humor, black humor, and classical comedy emerge from Faulkner's books and give them much of their vigor. Thus Faulkner and Humor offers fresh vision for Faulkner's legions of readers who have seen his fiction as arising only from a dark and forbidding world.

In Michael Millgate's essay he writes that ""To see the places where an author lived and walked, and typed; to see what he daily saw, smell what he smelled; experience the resources of his native climate: these things have the fascination of biography, and they can illuminate the work, enrich one's individual apprehension of that work, in much the same way good biography does.""William Faulkner's native climate was the small north Mississippi town of Oxford after which he patterned his mythical Yoknapatawpha County. Each year the University of Mississippi, located in Oxford, sponsors a conference to allow Faulkner enthusiasts to study the author on his own ground. The essays in this volume, delivered as part of the 1976 conference, are concerned with the relationship between William Faulkner's work and its southern setting.As Faulkner himself and the authors of these essays insist, the South is part of the United States and ultimately a part of Western society. Rather than considering Faulkner as an isolated southern oddity who inexplicably wrote important fiction, these authors explore why Faulkner's ""Southerness"" made him universal.They do not attempt to draw a one-to-one relationship between Mississippi and Yoknapatawpha or to reduce Faulkner to the status of a fictionalizing sociologist recording the life of an area. Daniel Aaron, for example, traces the historical relationship of the South to the rest of the United States and to England, isolates a talent for the concrete and particular as a trait maintained longer in the South than in other regions, and suggests that Faulkner, in embodying his universal insights in a concrete setting and society, was at once most Southern and most universal.

Although he spent the bulk of his life in Oxford, Mississippi-far removed from the intellectual centers of modernism and the writers who created it-William Faulkner (1897-1962) proved to be one of the American novelists who most comprehensively grasped modernism. In his fiction he tested its tenets in the most startling and insightful ways. What, then, did such contemporaries as Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, and Walker Evans think of his work? How did his times affect and accept what he wrote? Faulkner and His Contemporaries explores the relationship between the Nobel laureate, ensconced in his ""postage stamp of native soil,"" and the world of letters within which he created his masterpieces. In this anthology, essays focus on such topics as how Faulkner's literary antecedents (in particular, Willa Cather and Joseph Conrad) influenced his writing, his literary/aesthetic feud with rival Ernest Hemingway, and the common themes he shares with fellow southerners Welty and Evans. Several essays examine the environment in which Faulkner worked. Deborah Clarke concentrates on the rise of the automobile industry. W. Kenneth Holditch shows how the city of New Orleans acted as a major force in Faulkner's fiction, and Grace Elizabeth Hale examines how the civil rights era of Faulkner's later career compelled him to deal with his ideas about race and rebellion in new ways.

William Faulkner grew up and began his writing career during a time of great cultural upheaval, especially in the realm of sexuality, where every normative notion of identity and relationship was being re-examined. Not only does Faulkner explore multiple versions of sexuality throughout his work, but he also studies the sexual dimension of various social, economic, and aesthetic concerns.In Faulkner's Sexualities, contributors query Faulkner's life and fiction in terms of sexual identity, sexual politics, and the ways in which such concerns affect his aesthetics. Given the frequent play with sexual norms and practices, how does Faulkner's fiction constitute the sexual subject in relation to the dynamics of the body, language, and culture? In what ways does Faulkner participate in discourses of masculinity and femininity, desire and reproduction, heterosexuality and homosexuality? In what ways are these discourses bound up with representations of race and ethnicity, modernity and ideology, region and nation? In what ways do his texts touch on questions concerning the racialization of categories of gender within colonial and dominant metropolitan discourses and power relations? Is there a Southern sexuality? This volume wrestles with these questions and relates them to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.

There are three wars in the mind and in the art of William Faulkner--the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Although he did not fight in any war, he postured as a veteran flyer, for he had enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in Canada. In his novels, short stories, essays, and letters, war remained a looming subject. Faulkner and War, a collection of essays from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held at the University of Mississippi in 2001, explores the role that war played in the life and work of a writer whose career seems forever poised against a backdrop of wars going on or recently ended or in the volatile years between. Perhaps most significant for all his works was the Civil War, which had ended thirty-two years before Faulkner was born. Yet it was the vast, escapable panorama against which he set his novels of the anguished South. John Limon discusses Faulkner's attempt to show how much of the sense of reality that the Great War produced could be rendered in fiction without explicit reference to it, as, for example, in one novel seemingly remote from the war, As I Lay Dying. Lothar Hönnighausen examines Faulkner's evolving ideological attitudes toward war in Soldiers' Pay, A Fable, and The Mansion. These and other essays give illumination to Faulkner's close analysis of war and its consequences as they appear in his work. Noel Polk, a professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the author of Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner, Eudora Welty: A Critical Bibliography, Outside the Southern Myth (all from University Press of Mississippi), and other books. Ann J. Abadie, co-editor of publications in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series, is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.