Creating Yoknapatawpha is a study of the crucial interplay of reading and writing processes involved in constructing the textual environment of William Faulkner 's work, and the nature and significance of the world created by these many forces. Yoknapatawpha County, the author contends, is the product of these mainly mental processes of construction at all levels, and it is in the similar and even analogous situations that exist between readers and writers of and in the fiction that the dynamic of Faulkner 's work is most keenly discovered. The book discusses novels from throughout Faulkner 's career, and uses elements of Bakhtinian and reader-response theory, among others, to explore its subject, eschewing the limited focus both of strictly formal and more content-oriented approaches, and demonstrating the need for readers and writers to work together, whether harmoniously or otherwise. By examining the fictive nature of Yoknapatawpha, and the requirement for everybody to participate fully in its creation, we can establish useful bases for investigations into the real world issues with which Faulkner is so concerned.

Creating Yoknapatawpha is a study of the crucial interplay of reading and writing processes involved in constructing the textual environment of William Faulkner s work, and the nature and significance of the world created by these many forces. Yoknapatawpha County, the author contends, is the product of these mainly mental processes of construction at all levels, and it is in the similar and even analogous situations that exist between readers and writers of and in the fiction that the dynamic of Faulkner s work is most keenly discovered. The book discusses novels from throughout Faulkner s career, and uses elements of Bakhtinian and reader-response theory, among others, to explore its subject, eschewing the limited focus both of strictly formal and more content-oriented approaches, and demonstrating the need for readers and writers to work together, whether harmoniously or otherwise. By examining the fictive nature of Yoknapatawpha, and the requirement for everybody to participate fully in its creation, we can establish useful bases for investigations into the real world issues with which Faulkner is so concerned."

'American Tropics' refers to a kind of extended Caribbean, an area that includes the southern USA, the Atlantic littoral of Central America, the Caribbean islands, and northern South America. European colonial powers fought intensively here against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources. The regions in the American Tropics share a history in which the dominant fact is the arrival of millions of white Europeans and black Africans; share an environment that is tropical or sub-tropical; and share a socio-economic model (the plantation), whose effects lasted at least well into the twentieth century.The imaginative space of the American Tropics therefore offers a differently centred literary history from those conventionally produced as US, Caribbean, or Latin American literature. This important collection brings together essays by distinguished scholars, including the late Neil Whitehead, Richard Price, Sally Price, and Susan Gillman, that engage with the idea of a literary geography of the American Tropics and that represent the rich diversity of the writing produced within this geographical area.