William Faulkner And The Southern Landscape

Charles S. Aiken, a native of Mississippi who was born a few miles from Oxford, has been thinking and writing about the geography of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County for more than thirty years. William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape is the culmination of that long-term scholarly project. It is a fresh approach to a much-studied writer and a provocative meditation on the relationship between literary imagination and place. Four main geographical questions shape Aiken's journey to the family seat of the Compsons and the Snopeses. What patterns and techniques did Faulkner use--consciously or subconsciously--to convert the real geography of Lafayette County into a fictional space? Did Faulkner intend Yoknapatawpha to serve as a microcosm of the American South? In what ways does the historical geography of Faulkner's birthplace correspond to that of the fictional world he created? Finally, what geographic legacy has Faulkner left us through the fourteen novels he set in Yoknapatawpha? With an approach, methodology, and sources primarily derived from historical geography, Aiken takes the reader on a tour of Faulkner's real and imagined worlds. The result is an informed reading of Faulkner's life and work and a refined understanding of the relation of literary worlds to the real places that inspire them.

Accomplished photographer George G. Stewart has crafted a pictorial study of the vanishing southern landscape that William Faulkner so richly captured as the mythical north Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. Through eighty-four black-and-white photographs, Stewart records--and in some instances re-creates--authentic scenes and objects represented in Faulkner's fiction, conjoining these original, haunting visuals with corresponding passages from classic Faulkner texts. Stewart conveys a richly gothic perspective on a bygone South where equal sway is commanded by darkness and light, past and present, legacy and destiny. These photographs present the few monuments, locales, and landmarks in or near Mississippi's Lafayette and Tippah counties that have survived the rigors of time and commercial progress to stand as the last visible links to the world from which Faulkner's fiction emerged. In this guidebook to an imaginary realm, Stewart ably illustrates both place and tone by adapting Faulknerian literary techniques in his photography. The use of double exposure in some images evokes the stream of consciousness, foreshadowing, and doubling employed by Faulkner in his writing. The sequencing of images recalls the discontinuous circling of themes and fracturing of narratives in the writer's vision and depicts the South on the brink of transition, yet still mired in the morass of an inescapable past. The juxtaposition of Stewart's distinctive photography with samplings from Faulkner's writing offers a provocative glimpse across an iconic but disappearing southern landscape soon to exist only in artistic imaginings such as this. The volume also includes a foreword by Robert W. Hamblin, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University.

William Faulkner continues to be an author who is widely read, studied, and admired. This book provides a new and interdisciplinary account of Faulkner's legacy, arguing that his fiction is just as relevant today as it was during his own time. Indeed, Faulkner's far-reaching critique of his Southern heritage speaks directly to the anti-racism discourse of our own time and engages the dire threat to subjecthood in a technologically saturated civilization. Combining literary critique with network and complexity science, this study offers a new reading of William Faulkner as a novelist for the information age. Over the course of his career, we find an artist struggling to articulate the threat to human wellbeing in rapidly scaling social systems and gradually developing a hard-won humanism that affirms the individual and interpersonal life as a source of novelty and social change.

This book sheds light on the modernist short story cycle and its pivotal role in representing and depicting place. With an ever-changing attitude towards place and what it means, modernist writers found in the short story cycle a suitable form to depict this sense of change. Drawing from a range of recent theories of the short story cycle and theories of place, this book highlights, in a comparative way, the role of the emergent short story genre and its seminal role in grasping and capturing a fragmented world through the various short and interconnected narratives and narrative strategies a short story cycle can accommodate. As such, this text contributes to the study of the modernist short story (cycle), American literature, Irish literature, comparative literature, and theories and studies of place.

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.

In 1952, Faulkner noted the exceptional nature of the South when he characterized it as “the only really authentic region in the United States, because a deep indestructible bond still exists between man and his environment.” The essays collected in Faulkner and the Ecology of the South explore Faulkner's environmental imagination, seeking what Ann Fisher-Wirth calls the : “ecological counter-melody” of his texts. “Ecology” was not a term in common use outside the sciences in Faulkner's time. However, the word “environment” seems to have held deep meaning for Faulkner. Often he repeated his abiding interest in “man in conflict with himself, with his fellow man, or with his time and place, his environment.” Eco-criticism has led to a renewed interest among literary scholars for what in this volume Cecelia Tichi calls, “humanness within congeries of habitats and environments.” Philip Weinstein draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Eric Anderson argues that Faulkner's fiction has much to do with ecology in the sense that his work often examines the ways in which human communities interact with the natural world, and François Pitavy sees Faulkner's wilderness as unnatural in the ways it represents reflections of man's longings and frustrations. Throughout these essays, scholars illuminate in fresh ways the precarious ecosystem of Yoknapatawpha County.

Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Selected as an Outstanding Reference Source by the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association There are many anthologies of southern literature, but this is the first companion. Neither a survey of masterpieces nor a biographical sourcebook, The Companion to Southern Literature treats every conceivable topic found in southern writing from the pre-Columbian era to the present, referencing specific works of all periods and genres. Top scholars in their fields offer original definitions and examples of the concepts they know best, identifying the themes, burning issues, historical personalities, beloved icons, and common or uncommon stereotypes that have shaped the most significant regional literature in memory. Read the copious offerings straight through in alphabetical order (Ancestor Worship, Blue-Collar Literature, Caves) or skip randomly at whim (Guilt, The Grotesque, William Jefferson Clinton). Whatever approach you take, The Companion’s authority, scope, and variety in tone and interpretation will prove a boon and a delight. Explored here are literary embodiments of the Old South, New South, Solid South, Savage South, Lazy South, and “Sahara of the Bozart.” As up-to-date as grit lit, K Mart fiction, and postmodernism, and as old-fashioned as Puritanism, mules, and the tall tale, these five hundred entries span a reach from Lady to Lesbian Literature. The volume includes an overview of every southern state’s belletristic heritage while making it clear that the southern mind extends beyond geographical boundaries to form an essential component of the American psyche. The South’s lavishly rich literature provides the best means of understanding the region’s deepest nature, and The Companion to Southern Literature will be an invaluable tool for those who take on that exciting challenge. Description of Contents 500 lively, succinct articles on topics ranging from Abolition to Yoknapatawpha 250 contributors, including scholars, writers, and poets 2 tables of contents — alphabetical and subject — and a complete index A separate bibliography for most entries

Considered by many to be the most influential US novelist the world has known, William Faulkner's roots and his writing are planted in a single obscure county in the Deep South. A foremost international modernist, Faulkner's subjects and characters, ironically, are more readily associated with the history and sociology of the most backward state in the Union. He experimented endlessly with narrative structure, developing an unorthodox writing style. Yet his main goal was to reveal the truth of "the human heart in conflict with itself," ultimately defining human nature through the lens of his own Southern experience. This comprehensive account of Faulkner's literary career features an exploration of his novels and key short stories, including The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and many more. Drawing on psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, feminist, and post-colonial theory, it offers an imaginative topography of Faulkner's efforts to reckon with his Southern past, to acknowledge its modernization, and to develop his own modernist method.