Faulkner in America

< With essays by Richard Godden Catherine Gunther Kodat Kathryn B. McKee Peter Nicolaison Charles A. Peek Noel Polk Hortense J. Spillers Joseph R. Urgo Linda Wagner-Martin and Charles Reagan WilsonWilliam Faulkner is Mississippi's most famous author and arguably one of the country's greatest writers. But what was his relationship with America? How did he view the nation its traditions its issues?In ten essays from the 1998 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference held at the University of Mississippi Faulkner in America looks closely at the exchange between William Faulkner the writer and his national affiliation. Collectively the essays ask which American ideas identities and conflicts we should associate with Mississippi's Nobel Laureate.The collection explores questions regarding Faulkner's place in American literature his standing and esteem in literary studies and his relation to the United States. To address such issues the writers seek a definition of the phrase Faulkner in America.One difficulty scholars wrestle with is how to deal with Mississippi's place in the union. Surely Faulkner mused: Is Mississippi in America? When he thought about America he thought about being left alone about maintaining his distance.Essays in this volume look at Faulkner's views on the greening of American history on American figures such as Thomas Jefferson on women in American letters and on the American dream.Authors find that the conceptually invigorating signification of the phrase Faulkner in America is finally provisional. Foremost in Faulkner's mind in interviews as well as in the aesthetics of the apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County is that whoever and whatever is in America arrived by battles won and lost by emigration and enslavement by choice and by compulsion. Faulkner in America occasions a rigorous examination of Faulkner's American century.