This study examines the vexed and contradictory responses of the South's most celebrated novelist to the traditional representations of women that were bequeathed to him by his culture. Tracing the ways in which William Faulkner characterized women in his fiction, Diane Roberts posits six familiar representations--the Confederate woman, the mammy, the tragic mulatta, the new belle, the spinster, and the mother--and through close feminist readings shows how the writer reactivated and reimagined them. "As a southerner," Roberts writes, "Faulkner inherited the images, icons, and demons of his culture. They are part of the matter of the region with which he engages, sometimes accepting, sometimes rejecting." Drawing on extensive research into southern popular culture and the findings and interpretations of historians, Roberts demonstrates how Faulkner's greatest fiction, published during the 1920s and 1930s, grew out of his reactions to the South's extreme and sometimes violent attempts to redefine and solidify its hierarchical conceptions of race, gender, and class. Struggling to understand his region, Roberts says, Faulkner exposed the South's self-conceptions as quite precarious, with women slipping toward masculinity, men slipping toward femininity, and white identity slipping toward black. At their best, according to Roberts, Faulkner's novels reveal the South's failure to reassert the boundaries of race, gender, and class by which it has traditionally sustained itself.

The contributors to this collection consider questions debated for many decades in Faulkner studies and those recently raised to prominence under the illuminating ray of feminist criticism

Real Women Run is an innovative feminist ethnography that consists of a series of linked essays and presentations about women who run at the intersections of queer, feminist, and running identities. Faulkner uses feminist grounded theory, poetic inquiry, and qualitative content analysis to examine women’s embodied stories of running: how they run, how running fits into the context of their lives and relationships, how they enact or challenge cultural scripts of women’s activities and normative running bodies, and what running means for their lives and identities. During a two-and-a-half-year ethnography with women who run, Faulkner engaged in an intersectional qualitative content analysis of websites and blogs targeted to women runners, a grounded theory poetic analysis of 41 interviews with women who run, and participant observation at road races. Real Women Run speaks to the call for a more physical feminism. This ethnography sees women’s physical and mental strength developed through running as a way to embrace the contradictions between a deconstructed focus on the mind/body split and the focus on individuals’ actual material bodies and their everyday interactions with their bodies and through their bodies with the world around them.

From the inside scoop on goddesses, Amazons, and ancient matriarchal societies, to feminist theology and pagan rituals--Women’s Spirituality offers a comprehensive survey of what is happening in women’s spirituality today. Mary Faulkner also provides a sweeping historical and social overview of women’s spiritual experience from the dawn of civilization to present day: Goddesses, amazons, priestesses and Magicthe history of early matriarchal societiesecofeminismPagan and New Age ritualsWiccan, Celtic, Jewish, Christian, native peoples, and other spiritual traditions Faulkner also highlights the work of well-known writers, theologians, and academics who have contributed to the field, including Barbara Walker, Marija Gimbutas, Luisah Teish, Starhawk, Alice Walker, Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sallie McFague, Mary Daly, Judith Plaskow, Carol Christ, Sue Monk Kidd, and many more. For the novice, adept, or the simply curious, this book offers both a sweeping history and an inside view of one of the most profound movements and moving religious impulses of today.

"Judith Sensibar's deeply moving and remarkable biography of William Faulkner explores as never before the influence of three crucial relationships - with his black and white mothers, Caroline Barr and Maud Falkner, and with his wife Estelle Oldham. These Southern women gave life to Faulkner's imagination, profoundly shaping the emotional and psychological worlds of his fiction."--Back cover.

In this first critical study of female abolitionists and feminists in the freedmen's aid movement, Carol Faulkner describes these women's radical view of former slaves and the nation's responsibility to them. Moving beyond the image of the Yankee schoolmarm, Women's Radical Reconstruction demonstrates fully the complex and dynamic part played by Northern women in the design, implementation, and administration of Reconstruction policy. This absorbing account illustrates how these activists approached women's rights, the treatment of freed slaves, and the federal government's role in reorganizing Southern life. Like Radical Republicans, black and white women studied here advocated land reform, political and civil rights, and an activist federal government. They worked closely with the military, the Freedmen's Bureau, and Northern aid societies to provide food, clothes, housing, education, and employment to former slaves. These abolitionist-feminists embraced the Freedmen's Bureau, seeing it as both a shield for freedpeople and a vehicle for women's rights. But Faulkner rebuts historians who depict a community united by faith in free labor ideology, describing a movement torn by internal tensions. The author explores how gender conventions undermined women's efforts, as military personnel and many male reformers saw female reformers as encroaching on their territory, threatening their vision of a wage labor economy, and impeding the economic independence of former slaves. She notes the opportunities afforded to some middle-class black women, while also acknowledging the difficult ground they occupied between freed slaves and whites. Through compelling individual examples, she traces how female reformers found their commitment to gender solidarity across racial lines tested in the face of disagreements regarding the benefits of charity and the merits of paid employment.