Faulkner's Geographies

The recent spatial turn in social theory and cultural studies opens up exciting new possibilities for the study of William Faulkners literature. The fictional domains of Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson, Mississippi, are not simply imagined communities but imaginative geographies of remarkable complexity and detail, as evidenced by the maps Faulkner created of his apocryphal county. Exploring the diverse functions of space in Faulkners artistic vision, the eleven essays in Faulkners Geographies delve deep into Yoknapatawpha but also reach beyond it, to uncover unsuspected connections and flows linking local, regional, national, hemispheric, and global geographies in Faulkners writings. Individual contributions examine the influence of the plantation as a land-use regime on Faulkners imagination of north Mississippis geography; the emergence of micro-Souths as a product of modern migratory patterns in the urban North of Faulkners fiction; the enlistment of the authors work in the geopolitics of the cultural Cold War during the 1950s; the historical and literary affiliations between Faulkners Deep South and Greater Mexico; the local and idiosyncratic as alternatives to region and nation; the unique intersection of regional and metropolitan geographies that Faulkner encountered as a novice writer immersed in the literary culture of New Orleans; the uses of feminist geography to trace the interplay of gender, space, and movement; and the circulation of Caribbean and Black South spaces and itineraries through Faulkners masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom! By bringing new attention to the function of space, place, mapping, and movement in his literature, Faulkners Geographies seeks to redraw the very boundaries of Faulkner studies.