In 1957 and 1958 William Faulkner was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia. During that time he held thirty-seven conferences and answered over two thousand questions on a wide range of concerns, from exegetic problems in his novels to the role of the writer in modern society. Almost every word was recorded on tape, and the result is the classic Faulkner in the University, originally published in 1959 and now available for the first time in a paperback edition. The material collected here offers testimony to some fascinating exchanges between the author and his public and makes up one of the few sourcebooks available on Faulkner's personal views. As the writer himself commented, "These are questions answered without rehearsal or preparation, by a man old enough in the craft of the human heart to have learned that there are no definitive answers to anything, yet still young enough in spirit to believe that truth may still be found provided one seeks enough, tests and discards, and still tries again".

William Faulkner remains one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, and Faulkner Studies offers up seemingly endless ways to engage anew questions and problems that continue to occupy literary studies into the twenty-first century, and beyond the compass of Faulkner himself. His corpus has proved particularly accommodating of a range of perspectives and methodologies that include Black studies, visual culture studies, world literatures, modernist studies, print culture studies, gender and sexuality studies, sound studies, the energy humanities, and much else. The fifteen essays collected in The New William Faulkner Studies charts these developments in Faulkner scholarship over the course of this new century and offers prospects for further interrogation of his oeuvre.

Charles S. Aiken, a native of Mississippi who was born a few miles from Oxford, has been thinking and writing about the geography of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County for more than thirty years. William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape is the culmination of that long-term scholarly project. It is a fresh approach to a much-studied writer and a provocative meditation on the relationship between literary imagination and place. Four main geographical questions shape Aiken's journey to the family seat of the Compsons and the Snopeses. What patterns and techniques did Faulkner use--consciously or subconsciously--to convert the real geography of Lafayette County into a fictional space? Did Faulkner intend Yoknapatawpha to serve as a microcosm of the American South? In what ways does the historical geography of Faulkner's birthplace correspond to that of the fictional world he created? Finally, what geographic legacy has Faulkner left us through the fourteen novels he set in Yoknapatawpha? With an approach, methodology, and sources primarily derived from historical geography, Aiken takes the reader on a tour of Faulkner's real and imagined worlds. The result is an informed reading of Faulkner's life and work and a refined understanding of the relation of literary worlds to the real places that inspire them.