"Absalom, Absalom " has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. It is, on one level, the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him." On another level, the book narrates the tragedy that befalls the entire Sutpen family and that tragedy's legacy that continues well into the twentieth century and beyond. The novel's intricate, demanding prose style, and its haunting dramatization of the South's intricate, demanding history make it a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature.

"Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom " offers a close examination and interpretation of the novel. Here difficult words and cultural terms that might prove to be a problem for general readers are explained and keyed to page numbers in the definitive Faulkner text (Library of America and Vintage editions). The authors place Faulkner's novel in its historical context, while also connecting it to his other works.

Willa Cather's My Antonia is considered one of the most significant American novels of the twentieth century. Set during the great migration west to settle the plains of the North American continent, the narrative follows Antonia Shimerda, a pioneer who comes to Nebraska as a child and grows with the country, inspiring a childhood friend, Jim Burden, to write her life story. The novel is important both for its literary aesthetic and as a portrayal of important aspects of American social ideals and history, particularly the centrality of migration to American culture. The Broadview edition includes a rich selection of primary source materials: the revised introduction for the 1926 edition; Cather's Mesa Verde Wonderland is Easy to Reach Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle, Peter and her comments on the novel; contemporary reviews and photographs.

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.

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 ."

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.

Joseph R. Urgo is chair of the English department at the University of Mississippi. His many books include "In the Age of Distraction," from the University Press of Mississippi.

Ann J. Abadie is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and co-editor of publications in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series.

"Absalom, Absalom " has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. It is, on one level, the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him." On another level, the book narrates the tragedy that befalls the entire Sutpen family and that tragedy's legacy that continues well into the twentieth century and beyond. The novel's intricate, demanding prose style, and its haunting dramatization of the South's intricate, demanding history make it a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature.

"Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom " offers a close examination and interpretation of the novel. Here difficult words and cultural terms that might prove to be a problem for general readers are explained and keyed to page numbers in the definitive Faulkner text (Library of America and Vintage editions). The authors place Faulkner's novel in its historical context, while also connecting it to his other works.

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 Culture, 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.

Focuses a sharp eye on how the landscape of the American Southwest served Cather creatively and the ways it shaped her research and productivity The American Southwest was arguably as formative a landscape for Willa Cather's aesthetic vision as was her beloved Nebraska. Both landscapes elicited in her a sense of raw incompleteness. They seemed not so much finished places as things unassembled, more like countries still waiting to be made into a] landscape. Cather's fascination with the Southwest led to its presence as a significant setting in three of her most ambitious novels: The Song of the Lark, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. This volume focuses a sharp eye on how the landscape of the American Southwest served Cather creatively and the ways it shaped her research and productivity. No single scholarly methodology prevails in the essays gathered here, giving the volume rare depth and complexity.

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.