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

In Faulkner's Imperialism, Taylor Hagood explores two staples of Faulkner's world: myth and place. Using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the economic, sociological, and political factors in Faulkner's writing, he applies postcolonial theory, cultural materialism, and the work of the New Southernists to analyze the ways myth and place come together to encode narratives of imperialism -- and anti-imperialism -- in the worlds in which Faulkner lived and the one that he created. The resulting discussion highlights the deeply embedded imperial impulses underpinning not just Yoknapatawpha and Mississippi, but the Midwest, the Caribbean, France, and a host of often-overlooked corners of the Faulknerian map. Faulkner defines space in his fiction by creating places through culturally compelling narratives. Although these narrative spaces often have imperial roots, Hagood reveals how the oppressed can subvert these "mythic places" by turning the myths against their oppressors. The Greco-Roman myths long recognized as part of Faulkner's fictional world, for example, define racially hybrid spaces ostensibly designed to articulate white patriarchal narratives of imperial control but which actually carry within their very dreams of Arcady an anti-imperial narrative. In Faulkner's Mississippi Delta, which he modeled after the Nile Delta, plantation owners evoke the imperial power of ancient Egypt to confirm their own cultural ascendancy even while African Americans use biblical narratives of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt to speak against the power that controls them. Faulkner also used places he personally experienced -- such as New Orleans, a city that he recognized as containing multiple layers of imperial design -- to dramatize the constant struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed. Rather than reading the roles of myth and place according to conventional myth criticism or typical place models used by other Faulkner scholars, Hagood examines the intertextuality within Faulkner's writing, as well as the relationship of his writing to others' work, in an attempt to understand how the texts fit together and speak to one another. One of the few books that examine Faulkner's work as a whole, Faulkner's Imperialism moves beyond South-versus-North paradigms to encompass all the spaces within Faulkner's created cosmos, considering their interrelationships in a precise, holistic way.

This reference investigates the role of landscape in popular works and in doing so explores the time in which they were written. Literary Geography: An Encyclopedia of Real and Imagined Settings is an authoritative guide for students, teachers, and avid readers who seek to understand the importance of setting in interpreting works of literature, including poetry. By examining how authors and poets shaped their literary landscapes in such works as The Great Gatsby and Nineteen Eighty-Four, readers will discover historical, political, and cultural context hidden within the words of their favorite reads. The alphabetically arranged entries provide easy access to analysis of some of the most well-known and frequently assigned pieces of literature and poetry. Entries begin with a brief introduction to the featured piece of literature and then answer the questions: "How is literary landscape used to shape the story?"; "How is the literary landscape imbued with the geographical, political, cultural, and historical context of the author's contemporary world, whether purposeful or not?" Pop-up boxes provide quotes about literary landscapes throughout the book, and an appendix takes a brief look at the places writers congregated and that inspired them. A comprehensive scholarly bibliography of secondary sources pertaining to mapping, physical and cultural geography, ecocriticism, and the role of nature in literature rounds out the work.

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!.

This book treats William Faulkner's major fiction--from Flags in the Dust through to Absalom, Absalom!--to a searching reappraisal under the spotlight of a media-historical inquiry. It proposes that Faulkner's inveterate attraction to the paradigms of romance was disciplined and masked by the recurrent use of metaphorical figures borrowed from the new media ecology. Faulkner dressed up his romance materials in the technological garb of radio, gramophony, photography, and cinema, along with the transportational networks of road and air that were being installed in the 1920s. His modernism emerges from a fraght but productive interplay between his anachronistic predilection for chivalric chichés and his extraordinarily knowledgeable interest in the most up-to-date media institutions and forms. Rather than see Faulkner as a divided author, who worked for money in the magazines and studios while producing his serious fiction in despite of their symbolic economies, this study demonstrates how profoundly his mature art was shot through with the figures and dynamics of the materials he publicly repudiated. The result is a richer and more nuanced understanding of the dialectics of his art.

p.11-25; Description of appearance of original population; relationships with colonists and sealers; native women; Brief notes on foods, tatooing, rafts, weapons, canoes; Quotes early writers.