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.

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.""

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.

Whatever the various roles he played and whatever his occasional claims that he was not at all a "literary man," William Faulkner was in fact the most devoted of artists. He was absolutely dedicated to the work, and, as this volume demonstrates, he was fascinated with the personality, the generative process, and the practice of the artist. These fourteen original essays from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1993 at the University of Mississippi, explore a wide range of issues revolving around the meaning of art, artistry, and the artist in Faulkner's life and fiction. Here some of Faulkner's most fervent readers and critics assess the impact on him of the visual arts and architecture, the role of artist figures in such novels as The Sound and the Fury and The Wild Palms, as well as their guise as lawyers in Sanctuary, Go Down, Moses, and The Town, and the meaning of "telling" and "design" as exemplified both in the actions of fictional characters and in Faulkner's narrative strategies.

Characteristically, William Faulkner minimized his familiarity with the theories of psychology that were current during the years of his apprenticeship as a writer, especially those of Freud. Yet, Faulkner's works prove to be a trove for psychological study. These original papers from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1991 at the University of Mississippi, vary widely in their approaches to recent psychological speculation about Faulkner's texts. In recent years psychological analysis of literature has shifted largely from investigation of a writer's life to a focus on the work itself. Whether applying the theories of Freud and Lacan, drawing upon theoretical work in women's studies and men's studies, or emphasizing the rigid determinacy of psychological pressure, the essays included in this collection show Faulkner's works to be unquestionably rich in psychological materials.

The plants and landscape at Rowan Oak are the ""little postage stamp of soil"" that William Faulkner owned, walked, and tended for over thirty years during the writing of many of his short stories and novels. Faulkner saw and smelled the earth and listened to sounds from the cultivated grounds and the surrounding woods. This is the place that offered him refuge for writing and provided him food from its garden, fruit and nut trees, and pasture for his horses and a milk cow. Rowan Oak boasts a diverse landscape, encompassing an aristocratic eastern redcedar-lined drive and walk as well as hardy ornamental shrubs, trees, pastures, and a hardwood forest with virgin timber. More than fifty years after Faulkner's death, Rowan Oak remains a sanctuary and a place of mystery and beauty nestled in the midst of Oxford, Mississippi. The photographs in The Land of Rowan Oak are botanist Ed Croom's exploration and documentation of the changes in the plants and landscape over more than a decade. Croom encountered early morning mists, the summer heat and haze, and even rare snowfalls in his near-daily walks on the grounds. His photographs record a decaying fence line, trees and plants that have since disappeared, and the newly restored sunken garden. This book honors the land Faulkner loved. While Faulkner's novels have left an indelible legacy in southern and American letters, the landscape of his beloved home also serves as a record of the botanical history of this most storied corner of the American literary South.