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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, and Yung-Hsing Wu
William 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 that diverse publishing history in mind, this collection explores Faulkner's multifaceted engagements, as writer and reader, with the US and international print cultures of his era, along with how these cultures have mediated his relationship with various twentieth- and twenty-first-century audiences.
These essays address the place of Faulkner and his writings in the creation, design, publishing, marketing, reception, and collecting of books, in the culture of twentieth-century magazines, journals, newspapers, and other periodicals (from pulp to avant-garde), in the history of modern readers and readerships, and in the construction and cultural politics of literary authorship.
Several contributors focus on Faulkner's sensational 1931 novel Sanctuary to illustrate the author's multifaceted relationship to the print ecology of his time, tracing the novel's path from the wellsprings of Faulkner's artistic vision to the novel's reception among reviewers, tastemakers, intellectuals, and other readers of the early 1930s. Other essayists discuss Faulkner's early notices, the Saturday Review of Literature, Saturday Evening Post, men's magazines of the 1950s, and Cold War modernism.
About the author
Jay Watson (Editor) Jay Watson is Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. He is author of many publications, including
William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity;
Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner; and
Fossil-Fuel Faulkner: Energy, Modernity, and the US South. He is also coeditor of multiple volumes in University Press of Mississippi's Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series.
Jaime Harker (Editor) Jaime Harker is professor of literature and director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi and author of
America the Middlebrow: Women's Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars;
Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America;
and
The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women In Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon. James G. Thomas Jr. (Editor) James G. Thomas, Jr., is associate director for publications at the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He is an editor of the twenty-four-volume
New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and
The Mississippi Encyclopedia;
coeditor (with Jay Watson) of
Faulkner and Print Culture,
Faulkner and History, and
Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas; and editor of
Conversations with Barry Hannah. His work has appeared in
Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi: The Twentieth Century,
Southern Cultures,
Southern Quarterly,
and
Living Blues.
