Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Michael P. Bibler, Deborah Clarke, David
A. Davis, David M. Earle, Jason D. Fichtel, Elizabeth Fielder, Joseph
Fruscione, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Patrick E. Horn, Cheryl Lester, Jessica
Martell, Sharon Monteith, Richard C. Moreland, Alan Nadel, Julie Beth
Napolin, François Pitavy, Ramón Saldívar, Hortense J. Spillers, Terrell
L. Tebbetts, Zackary Vernon, Randall Wilhelm, and Charles Reagan Wilson
These essays examine issues across the wide arc of Faulkner's
extraordinary career, from his aesthetic apprenticeship in the visual
arts, to late-career engagements with the Cold War, the civil rights
movement, and beyond, to the place of death in his artistic vision and
the long, varied afterlives he and his writings have enjoyed in
literature and popular culture. Contributors deliver stimulating
reassessments of Faulkner's first novel, Soldiers' Pay; his final novel,
The Reivers; and much of the important work between. Scholars explore
how a broad range of elite and lowbrow cultural forms--plantation
diaries, phonograph records, pulp magazines--shaped Faulkner's capacious
imagination and how his works were translated into such media as film
and modern dance. Essays place Faulkner's writings in dialogue with
those of fellow twentieth-century authors including W. E. B. Du Bois,
Ernest Hemingway, Richard Hall, and Jayne Anne Phillips; locate his work
in relation to African American intellectual currents and Global South
artistic traditions; and weigh the rewards as well as the risks of
dislodging Faulkner from the canonical position he currently occupies.
While Faulkner studies has cultivated an image of the novelist as a
neglected genius who toiled in obscurity, a look back fifty years to the
final months of the author's life reveals a widely traveled and
celebrated artist whose significance was framed in national and
international as well as regional terms. Fifty Years after Faulkner
bears out that expansive view, reintroducing us to a writer whose work
retains its ability to provoke, intrigue, and surprise a variety of
readerships.
