The Lost Cause legend has been a stumbling block for artists and progressives in the U.S. South for more than a century and half, but lost causes of an ecological cast have also been a major problem for American environmentalists, whose nostalgia for “wild” landscapes untouched by modernity leaves many inattentive to the affordances and needs of the changing, compromised environments we currently inhabit. As such, the literature of the South, long attuned to the emotional and ideo...

Winner of the 2020 C. Hugh Holman Award William Faulkner has enjoyed a secure reputation as American modernism's foremost fiction writer, and as a landmark figure in international literary modernism, for well over half a century. Less secure, however, has been any scholarly consensus about what those modernist credentials actually entail. Over recent decades, there have been lively debates in modernist studies over the who, what, where, when, and how of the surprisingly el...

What if famous rock stars from the past, those who died young, in sudden and tragic ways, actually faked their deaths to become secret agents? Welcome to the world of The Dead Rock Stars, the heroes we never knew we had.The Dead Rock Stars is a tale about Cole Denton, a young tech genius who discovers the secret world of rock star secret agents. He is tasked with saving the world from an unknown threat—one that’s closer to home than either Elvis P...

Fossil-Fuel Faulkner is the first book-length study of a single writer in the emerging field of the energy humanities. As we try to imagine our way beyond a deeply problematic fossil energy regime that depletes and degrades the planet and sharpens the gap between Global North and Global South and move toward as more just and sustainable energy future, there is much to learn from how previous generations imagined the modern transition into a hydrocarbon-fueled world from the solar-...

William Faulkner wrote during a tumultuous period in southern racial consciousness, between the years of the enactment of Jim Crow and the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the South. Throughout the writer's career, racial paradigms were in flux, and these shifting notions are reflected in Faulkner's prose. Faulkner's fiction contains frequent questions about the ways in which white Americans view themselves with regard to race along with challenges to the racial codes and standar...

William Faulkner wrote during a tumultuous period in southern racial consciousness, between the years of the enactment of Jim Crow and the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the South. Throughout the writer's career racial paradigms were in flux, and these shifting notions are reflected in Faulkner's prose. Faulkner's fiction contains frequent questions about the ways in which white Americans view themselves with regard to race along with challenges to the racial codes and standard...

Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Thadious M. Davis, Matthew Dischinger, Dotty Dye, Chiyuma Elliott, Doreen Fowler, Joseph Fruscione, T. Austin Graham, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Lisa Hinrichsen, Randall Horton, George Hutchinson, Andrew B. Leiter, John Wharton Lowe, Jamaal May, Ben Robbins, Tim A. Ryan, Sharon Eve Sarthou, Jenna Sciuto, James Smethurst, and Jay WatsonAt the turn of the millennium, the Martinican novelist Édouard Glissant offered the bold prediction tha...

Contributions by Benjamin S. Child, Leigh Anne Duck, John N. Duvall, Amy A. Foley, Susan Stanford Friedman, Michael Gleason, Jolene Hubbs, Anne MacMaster, Sean McCann, Maggie E. Morris Davis, Julian Murphet, Ben Robbins, Benoît Tadié, Jay Watson, and Michael ZeitlinFew would dispute today that William Faulkner belongs among the front ranks of literary modernists, though he was not typically viewed in those terms when publishing his major works. But what sort of modernist—or moderni...

Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Gloria J. Burgess, David A. Davis, Sarah E. Gardner, Richard Godden, Ryan Heryford, Robert Jackson, Gavin Jones, Mary A. Knighton, Peter Lurie, John T. Matthews, Myka Tucker-Abramson, Michael Wainwright, Jay Watson, and Michael ZeitlinThe matter of money touches a writer's life at every point—in the need to make ends meet; in dealings with agents, editors, publishers, and bookstores; and in the choice of subject matter and the minutiae of imagined wor...

Contributions by Josephine Adams, Jeff Allred, Garry Bertholf, Maxwell Cassity, John N. Duvall, Katherine Henninger, Maude Hines, Robert Jackson, Julie Beth Napolin, Rebecca Nisetich, George Porter Thomas, Jay Watson, and Yuko YamamotoIf it seems outrageous to suggest that one of the twentieth century’s most important literary cartographers of the private recesses of consciousness is also among its great novelists of family, William Faulkner nonetheless fits the bill on both counts...

Contributions by Eric Gary Anderson, Melanie R. Anderson, Jodi A. Byrd, Gina Caison, Robbie Ethridge, Patricia Galloway, LeAnne Howe, John Wharton Lowe, Katherine M. B. Osburn, Melanie Benson Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Jay WatsonFrom new insights into the Chickasaw sources and far-reaching implications of Faulkner’s fictional place-name “Yoknapatawpha,” to discussions that reveal the potential for indigenous land-, family-, and story-based methodologies to deepen understanding of...

With contributions by Greg Barnhisel, John N. Duvall, Kristin Fujie, Sarah E. Gardner, Jaime Harker, Kristi Rowan Humphreys, Robert Jackson, Mary A. Knighton, Jennifer Nolan, Carl Rollyson, Tim A. Ryan, Jay Satterfield, Erin A. Smith, Jay Watson, and Yung-Hsing WuWilliam Faulkner's first ventures into print culture began far from the world of highbrow New York publishing houses such as Boni & Liveright or Random House and little magazines such as the Double Dealer. With th...