Photographs, lumber, airplanes, hand-hewn coffins--in every William Faulkner novel and short story worldly material abounds. The essays in Faulkner and Material Culture provide a fresh understanding of the things Faulkner brought from the world around him to the one he created.

Charles S. Aiken surveys Faulkner's representation of terrain and concludes, contrary to established criticism, that to Faulkner, Yoknapatawpha was not a microcosm of the South but a very particular and quite specifically located place. Jay Watson works with literary theory, philosophy, the history of...

Today, debates about globalization raise both hopes and fears. But what about during William Faulkner's time? Was he aware of worldwide cultural, historical, and economic developments? Just how interested was Faulkner in the global scheme of things?

The contributors to Global Faulkner suggest that a global context is helpful for recognizing the broader international meanings of Faulkner's celebrated regional landscape. Several scholars address how the flow of capital from the time of slavery through the Cold War period in his fiction links Faulkner's South with the larger world....

William Faulkner was born September 25, 1897. In honor of his centenary the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference of 1997 brought together twenty-five of the most important Faulkner scholars to examine the achievement of this writer generally regarded as the finest American novelist of the twentieth century.

The essays and panel discussions that make up Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect provide a comprehensive account of the man and his work, including discussions of his life, the shape of his career, and his place in American literature, as well as fresh readings of such...

These thirteen original papers from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference held in 19921 at the University of Mississippi explore some of the specific ideologies at work in William Faulkner's historical and socioeconomic moment, as well as his unique implementation of those ideologies in his fiction. The essays range from consideration of southern politics and history, consumer culture, race, and gender to theoretical speculation on the nature and impact of ideological analysis itself.

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...

Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text collects eleven essays in which contributors query the status of Faulkner's literary text in contemporary criticism and scholarship. How do scholars today approach Faulkner's texts? For some, including Arthur F. Kinney and James B. Carothers, -returns of the text- is a phrase that raises questions of aesthetics, poetics, and authority. For others, the phrase serves as an invitation to return to Faulkner's language, to writing and the letter itself. Serena Blount, Owen Robinson, James Harding, and Taylor Hagood interpret -returns of the...

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...

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...

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...

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...