Contributions by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Jordan Burke, Rebecca Bennett Clark, James C. Cobb, Anna Creadick, Colin Dayan, Wai Chee Dimock, Sarah E. Gardner, Hannah Godwin, Brooks E. Hefner, Andrew B. Leiter, Sean McCann, Conor Picken, Natalie J. Ring, Calvin Schermerhorn, and Jay Watson William Faulkner remains a historian’s writer. A distinguished roster of historians are drawn to him as a fellow historian, a shaper of narrative reflections on the meaning of the past; as a historiographer, a theorist and dramatist of the fraught enterprise of doing history; and as a historical figure himself, especially following his mid-century emergence as a public intellectual after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This volume brings together historians and literary scholars to explore the many facets of Faulkner’s relationship to history: the historical contexts of his novels and stories; his explorations of the historiographic imagination; his engagement with historical figures from both the regional and national past; his influence on professional historians; his pursuit of alternate modes of temporal awareness; and the histories of print culture that shaped the production, reception, and criticism of Faulkner’s work. Contributors draw on the history of development in the Mississippi Valley, the construction of Confederate memory, the history and curriculum of Harvard University, twentieth-century debates over police brutality and temperance reform, the history of modern childhood, and the literary histories of antislavery writing and pulp fiction to illuminate Faulkner’s work. Others in the collection explore the meaning of Faulkner’s fiction for such professional historians as C. Vann Woodward and Albert Bushnell Hart. In these ways and more, Faulkner and History offers fresh insights into one of the most persistent and long-recognized elements of the Mississippian’s artistic vision.

In this companion volume to William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, Cleanth Brooks takes an in-depth look at Faulkner's early poetry and prose as well as his five non-Yoknapatawpha novels -- Soldiers Pay, Mosquitoes, Pylon, The Wild Palms, and A Fable. Brooks also offers relevant clarification of some of his earlier interpretations of Faulkner that have been challenged -- most notably in the case of Faulkner that have been challenged -- most notable in the case of Absalom, Absalom!, which he considers Faulkner's greatest novel. Recognizing that the creative and imaginative center of Faulkner's art is Yoknapatawpha County, Brooks examines the merits of each of the works set beyond these boundaries and explores how these writings complement Faulkner as an artist. He sheds light on the literary sources that influenced Faulkner's early work and the technical innovations and general themes Faulkner was to develop in his later writing. The notes and appendixes with which Brooks concludes Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond serve only to amplify this comprehensive study.

This comprehensive Companion to William Faulkner reflects the current dynamic state of Faulkner studies. Explores the contexts, criticism, genres and interpretations of Nobel Prize-winning writer William Faulkner, arguably the greatest American novelist Comprises newly-commissioned essays written by an international contributor team of leading scholars Guides readers through the plethora of critical approaches to Faulkner over the past few decades Draws upon current Faulkner scholarship, as well as critically reflecting on previous interpretations

An examination of how Faulkner's work has been analyzed, elucidated, and promoted by a massive body of scholarly work spanning over seven decades.

This history of Lafayette County, Mississippi, uses William Faulkner's rich fictional portrait of a place and its people to illuminate the past. From the arrival of Europeans in Chickasaw Indian territory in 1540 to Faulkner's death in 1962, Doyle chronicles more than four centuries of local history. 27 illustrations. 3 maps.

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.

This new Companion offers a sample of innovative approaches to interpreting and appreciating William Faulkner in the twenty-first century.

Contributions by Tim Armstrong, Edward A. Chappell, W. Ralph Eubanks, Amy A. Foley, Michael Gorra, Sherita L. Johnson, Andrew B. Leiter, John T. Matthews, Julie Beth Napolin, Erin Penner, Stephanie Rountree, Julia Stern, Jay Watson, and Randall Wilhelm In 1930, the same year he moved into Rowan Oak, a slave-built former plantation home in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner published his first work of fiction that gave serious attention to the experience and perspective of an enslaved individual. For the next two decades, Faulkner repeatedly returned to the theme of slavery and to the figures of enslaved people in his fiction, probing the racial, economic, and political contours of his region, nation, and hemisphere in work such as The Sound and the Fury; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and Go Down, Moses. Faulkner and Slavery is the first collection to address the myriad legacies of African chattel slavery in the writings and personal history of one of the twentieth century’s most incisive authors on US slavery and the long ordeal of race in the Americas. Contributors to the volume examine the constitutive links among slavery, capitalism, and modernity across Faulkner’s oeuvre. They study how the history of slavery at the University of Mississippi informs writings like Absalom, Absalom! and trace how slavery’s topologies of the rectilinear grid or square run up against the more reparative geography of the oval in Faulkner’s narratives. Contributors explore how the legacies of slavery literally sound and resound across centuries of history, and across multiple novels and stories in Faulkner’s fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, and they reveal how the author’s remodeling work on his own residence brought him into an uncomfortable engagement with the spatial and architectural legacies of chattel slavery in north Mississippi. Faulkner and Slavery offers a timely intervention not only in the critical study of the writer’s work but in ongoing national and global conversations about the afterlives of slavery and the necessary work of antiracism.

For readers and critics, a guide to the Nobel Laureate's short stories