A critical exploration of the effects and influence of America's wars
upon the works of the Nobel Prize laureate There are three wars in the
mind and in the art of William Faulkner Faulkner and War, a collection
of essays from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held at the
University of Mississippi in 2001, explores the role that war played in
the life and work of a writer whose career seems forever poised against
a backdrop of wars going on or recently ended or in the volatile years
between. Perhaps most significant for all his works was the Civil War,
which had ended thirty-two years before Faulkner was born. Yet it was
the vast, escapable panorama against which he set his novels of the
anguished South. John Limon discusses Faulkner's attempt to show how
much of the sense of reality that the Great War produced could be
rendered in fiction without explicit reference to it, as, for example,
in one novel seemingly remote from the war, As I Lay Dying. Lothar
Hönnighausen examines Faulkner's evolving ideological attitudes toward
war in Soldiers' Pay, A Fable, and The Mansion. These and other essays
give illumination to Faulkner's close analysis of war and its
consequences as they appear in his work. Noel Polk, a professor of
English at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the author of
Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner, Eudora Welty:
A Critical Bibliography, Outside the Southern Myth (all from University
Press of Mississippi), and other books. Ann J. Abadie, co-editor of
publications in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series, is associate
director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the
University of Mississippi.
