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.

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, Francois Pitavy, Ramon Saldivar, 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 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 Tucker The 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.

Eudora Welty, for nearly forty years the first lady of southern letters, has recreated most memorably in her short stories and novels the voices and the personalities of her fellow Mississippians and southerners. What more fitting tribute could the Center for the Study of Southern Culture pay to one already honored in so many ways---by her readers and her colleagues, by critics and scholars---than to inaugurate its programs by inviting these admirers to meet with Miss Welty and celebrate her achievements? The Eudora Welty Symposium brought together on the University of Mississippi campus in November 1977 more than 800 persons from thirty-two states and three foreign countries. The papers presented at the symposium, exploring topics ranging from serious appraisals of her writings to lighter comments about Miss Welty as a friend, comprise the contents of "Eudora Welty: A Form of Thanks."

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. Other authors explore the literary similarities that connect Faulkner's South to Latin America, Africa, Spain, Japan, and the Caribbean. In essays by scholars from around the world, Faulkner emerges in trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific contexts, in a pan-Caribbean world, and in the space of the Middle Passage and the African Atlantic. The Nobel laureate's fiction is linked to that of such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Wole Soyinka, Miguel de Cervantes, and Kenji Nakagami."

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 woodworking and furniture-making, and social and intellectual history to explore how "Light in August" is tied intimately to the region's logging and woodworking industries.

Other essays in the volume include Kevin Railey's on the consumer goods that appear in "Flags in the Dust." Miles Orvell discusses the Confederate Soldier monuments installed in small towns throughout the South and how such monuments enter Faulkner's work. Katherine Henninger analyzes Faulkner's fictional representation of photographs and the function of photography within his fiction, particularly in "The Sound and the Fury," "Light in August," and "Absalom, Absalom ."

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 en-vironments." 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 Francois 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.

Joseph R. Urgo, Oxford, Mississippi, 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 Cultu""re, and "In the Age of Distraction," all published by University Press of Mississippi. Ann J. Abadie, Oxford, is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. She has coedited "Faulkner and His Contemporaries," "Faulkner and War," "Faulkner and Postmodernism," and "Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect," among other Faulkner volumes, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

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.

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.

Contributions by Hosam Aboul-Ela, Susan V. Donaldson, Richard Godden, Michael Gorra, Lisa Hinrichsen, Donald M. Kartiganer, Sarah Mahurin, Sean McCann, Noel Polk, Esther Sanchez-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.

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.

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.

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.

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 novels as "The Sound and the Fury," "Absalom, Absalom ," "If I Forget Thee," "Jerusalem," and "Go Down, Moses."

What emerges from this commemorative volume is a plural Faulkner, a writer of different value and meaning to different readers, a writer still challenging readers to accommodate their highly varied approaches to what Andre Bleikasten calls Faulkner's abiding "singularity.""

The perfect book for every Mississippian who cares about the state, this is a mammoth collaboration in which thirty subject editors suggested topics, over seven hundred scholars wrote entries, and countless individuals made suggestions. The volume will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about Mississippi and the people who call it home. The book will be especially helpful to students, teachers, and scholars researching, writing about, or otherwise discovering the state, past and present.The volume contains entries on every county, every governor, and numerous musicians, writers, artists, and activists. Each entry provides an authoritative but accessible introduction to the topic discussed. The Mississippi Encyclopedia also features long essays on agriculture, archaeology, the civil rights movement, the Civil War, drama, education, the environment, ethnicity, fiction, folklife, foodways, geography, industry and industrial workers, law, medicine, music, myths and representations, Native Americans, nonfiction, poetry, politics and government, the press, religion, social and economic history, sports, and visual art. It includes solid, clear information in a single volume, offering with clarity and scholarship a breadth of topics unavailable anywhere else. This book also includes many surprises readers can only find by browsing.

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.

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.

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 text"" in the sense in which Roland Barthes characterizes this shift in his seminal essay ""From Work to Text."" Faulkner's language itself is under close scrutiny in some of the readings that emphasize a deconstructive or a semiological approach to his writing. Historical and cultural contexts continue to play significant roles, however, in many of the essays such as those by Thadious Davis, Ted Atkinson, Martyn Bone, and Ethel Young-Minor. Instead of approaching the literary text as a reflection, a representation of that context, these readings stress the role of the text as a challenge to the power of external ideological systems. By retaining a bond with new historicist analysis and cultural studies, these essays are illustrative of a kind of analysis that carefully preserves attention to Faulkner's sociopolitical environment. The concluding essay by Theresa M. Towner issues an invitation to return to Faulkner's less well-known short stories for critical exposure and the pleasure of reading.

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. Contributors 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. Contributions by Hosam Aboul-Ela, Susan V. Donaldson, Richard Godden, Michael Gorra, Lisa Hinrichsen, Donald M. Kartiganer, Sarah Mahurin, Sean McCann, Noel Polk, Esther Sanchez-Pardo, Rachel Watson, Philip Weinstein

A probing of the many ways Faulkner interacted with the world's economies With contributions from Melanie R. Benson, Manuel Broncano, Keith Cartwright, Leigh Anne Duck, George B. Handley, Jeff Karem, Mario Materassi, John T. Matthews, Tierno Monenembo, Elizabeth Steeby, and Takako Tanaka 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. Other authors explore the literary similarities that connect Faulkner's South to Latin America, Africa, Spain, Japan, and the Caribbean. In essays by scholars from around the world, Faulkner emerges in trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific contexts, in a pan-Caribbean world, and in the space of the Middle Passage and the African Atlantic. The Nobel laureate's fiction is linked to that of such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Wole Soyinka, Miguel de Cervantes, and Kenji Nakagami.

These thirteen original essays from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1994 at the University of Mississippi, examine William Faulkner's texts in terms of their surprising range of gender portrayals.
The collection explores such themes as the male homosocial urge ay the heart of warfare, the blurring of gender distinctions in Faulkner's "epicene" figures, the function of cross-dressing as a form of defiance of traditional hierarchies. Several of the essays see in Faulkner a challenge to the "culture" vs. "nature" dichotomy itself, suggesting that sex may be a product of gender rather than its origin, that the line between the biological given and the social performance may be even more tenuous than we have assumed.

More than any other of the various contextualist approaches brought to bear on Faulkner's work, the focus on gender exemplifies the theory of the cultural construction of reality. Recent literary criticism, in large part owing to the emergence of feminism, has convincingly argued the difference between gender and sex, between the acculturated and the naturel. Among the results of the attention to gender in Faulkner studies is a fresh sense of fictional character as a site of multiple, sometimes clashing, personae, each gender role a signifier threatening to float free, speaking the reigning discourse, but always with a touch of conscious or unconscious parody.

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.

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 woodworking and furniture-making, and social and intellectual history to explore how "Light in August" is tied intimately to the region's logging and woodworking industries.

Other essays in the volume include Kevin Railey's on the consumer goods that appear in "Flags in the Dust." Miles Orvell discusses the Confederate Soldier monuments installed in small towns throughout the South and how such monuments enter Faulkner's work. Katherine Henninger analyzes Faulkner's fictional representation of photographs and the function of photography within his fiction, particularly in "The Sound and the Fury," "Light in August," and "Absalom, Absalom ."