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For centuries, Spain and the South have existed on the margins of U.S. and European identities—as much for the Francoist and Jim Crow periods as for their “exotic” cultures and sunny beaches attractive to tourists worldwide. Between Distant Modernities theorizes this trans-Atlantic link to show exactly how Spanish and Southern exceptionality became a performance developed as a specific response to modernity, and its perceived threat of homogenization, in the United States and Europe across the twentieth century. Seeing the War of 1898 as a climactic moment, this book begins by exploring the writings of the Nashville Agrarians and members of the so-called Generation of 1898, who each tried to regenerate a “traditional” Spain and South located in an agrarian past. That desire is constantly re-enacted by main characters in cultural production across the twentieth century as these characters simultaneously enact and problematize the issue of self/other, exile/citizen, and tourist/native that dominate both literary traditions.

This book surveys Eudora Welty’s fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. It shows how the 1930s witnessed the arrival of surrealism in the United States largely through the products of its visual artists. Welty, a frequent traveler to New York City, where the surrealists exhibited, and a keen reader of magazines and newspapers that disseminated their work, absorbed and unconsciously appropriated surrealism’s perspective in her writing. In fact, the first solo exhibition of her photographs in 1936 took place next door to New York’s premier venue for surrealist art. In a series of readings that collectively examine A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, The Wide Net and Other Stories, Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, the book reveals how surrealism profoundly shaped Welty’s striking figurative literature. Yet the influence of the surrealist movement extends beyond questions of style. The study’s interpretations also foreground how Welty’s writing refracted surrealism as a historical phenomena. Scattered throughout her stories are allusions to personalities allied with the movement in the United States, including figures such as Salvador Dali, Elsa Schiaparelli, Caresse Crosby, Wallace Simpson, Cecil Beaton, Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Henri Ford. Individuals such as these and others whom surrealism seduced often lead unorthodox and controversial lives that made them natural targets for moral opprobrium. Eschewing such parochialism, Welty borrowed the idiom of surrealism to develop modernized depictions of the South.

This book collects eleven essays presented at the Thirty-fifth Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, sponsored by the University of Mississippi, in Oxford on July 20–24, 2008. Contributors query the status of William Faulkner’s literary texts in contemporary criticism and scholarship. How do scholars today approach Faulkner’s fiction? For some, including Arthur F. Kinney and James B. Carothers, “returns of the text” is a phrase that raises questions of aesthetics, poetics, and authority. For others, the phrase serves as an invitation to return to Faulkner’s language, to writing and the letter itself. Serena Blount, Owen Robinson, James Harding, and Taylor Hagood interpret “returns of the text” in the sense in which Roland Barthes characterizes this shift in his seminal essay “From Work to Text.” For Barthes, the text “is not to be thought of as an object...but as a methodological field,” a notion quite different from the New Critical understanding of the work as a unified construct with intrinsic aesthetic value. Faulkner’s language itself is under close scrutiny in some of the readings that emphasize a deconstructive or a semiological approach to his writing. Historical and cultural contexts continue to play significant roles, however, in many of the essays. The contributions by Thadious Davis, Ted Atkinson, Martyn Bone, and Ethel Young-Minor by no means ignore the cultural contexts. These readings stress the role of the text as a challenge to the power of external ideological systems.

Photographs, lumber, airplanes, hand-hewn coffins—in every William Faulkner novel and short story, worldly material abounds. This book provides a fresh understanding of the things Faulkner brought from the world around him to the one he created. It surveys his representation of terrain and concludes, contrary to established criticism, that to Faulkner, Yoknapatawpha was not a microcosm of the South but a very particular and quite specifically located place. The book works with literary theory, philosophy, the history of woodworking and furniture-making, and social and intellectual history to explore how Light in August is tied intimately to the region’s logging and woodworking industries. Other chapters in the book include Kevin Railey’s on the consumer goods that appear in Flags in the Dust. Miles Orvell discusses the Confederate Soldier monuments installed in small towns throughout the South and how such monuments enter Faulkner’s work. Katherine Henninger analyzes Faulkner’s fictional representation of photographs and the function of photography within his fiction, particularly in The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!

As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South’s literary heritage around the world for over three decades. His work on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other writers is incisive and groundbreaking. Polk’s essays in this book maintain an abiding interest in his major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work’s larger themes. The analysis of this interplay between commas and dashes, curious occlusions, passages, and characters who have often gone unnoticed in the critical discourse—the bricks and mortar, as it were—and a work’s grand design is a crucial aspect of Polk’s scholarship. The book is a collection of his essays from the late 1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the South’s literary heritage, it asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis.

William Faulkner wrote during a tumultuous period in southern racial consciousness, between the years of the enactment of Jim Crow and the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the South. Throughout the writer’s career, racial paradigms were in flux, and these shifting notions are reflected in his prose. Faulkner’s fiction contains frequent questions about the ways in which white Americans view themselves with regard to race, along with challenges to the racial codes and standards of the region, and complex portrayals of the interactions between blacks and whites. Throughout his work, Faulkner contests white identity—its performance by whites and those passing for white, its role in shaping the South, and its assumption of normative identity in opposition to non-white “Others.” This is true even in novels without a strong visible African American presence, such as As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion. This book explores the ways in which Faulkner’s fiction addresses and destabilizes the concept of whiteness in American culture. Collectively, the chapters argue that whiteness, as part of the Nobel Laureate’s consistent querying of racial dynamics, is a central element. This anthology places Faulkner’s oeuvre—and scholarly views of it—in the contexts of its contemporary literature and academic trends exploring race and texts.

William Faulkner grew up and began his writing career during a time of great cultural upheaval, especially in the realm of sexuality, where every normative notion of identity and relationship was being re-examined. Not only does Faulkner explore multiple versions of sexuality throughout his work, but he also studies the sexual dimension of various social, economic, and aesthetic concerns. In this book, contributors query Faulkner’s life and fiction in terms of sexual identity, sexual politics, and the ways in which such concerns affect his aesthetics. Given the frequent play with sexual norms and practices, how does Faulkner’s fiction constitute the sexual subject in relation to the dynamics of the body, language, and culture? In what ways does Faulkner participate in discourses of masculinity and femininity, desire and reproduction, heterosexuality and homosexuality? In what ways are these discourses bound up with representations of race and ethnicity, modernity and ideology, region and nation? In what ways do Faulkner’s texts touch on questions concerning the racialization of categories of gender within colonial and dominant metropolitan discourses and power relations? Is there a Southern sexuality? The book wrestles with these questions and relates them to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.

Today, debates about globalization raise both hopes and fears. But what about during William Faulkner’s time? Was Faulkner aware of worldwide cultural, historical, and economic developments? Just how interested was he in the global scheme of things? The contributors to this book suggest that a global context is helpful for recognizing the broader international meanings of Faulkner’s celebrated regional landscape. Several scholars address how the flow of capital from the time of slavery through the Cold War period in his fiction links Faulkner’s South with the larger world. Other authors explore the literary similarities that connect Faulkner’s South to Latin America, Africa, Spain, Japan, and the Caribbean. In chapters by scholars from around the world, Faulkner emerges in trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific contexts, in a pan-Caribbean world, and in the space of the Middle Passage and the African Atlantic. The Nobel laureate’s fiction is linked to that of such writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Wole Soyinka, Miguel de Cervantes, and Kenji Nakagami.

This book is an exploration of how the concept of realism entered mass culture, and from there, how it tried to remake “America.” The literary and artistic creations of American realism are generally associated with the late nineteenth century. However, this book argues that the aesthetic actually saturated American culture in the 1930s and 1940s, and that the left social movements of the period were in no small part responsible. The book examines the prose of Carlos Bulosan and H. T. Tsiang; the photo essays of Margaret Bourke-White in Life magazine; the bestsellers of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell; the boxing narratives of Clifford Odets, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren; the Hollywood boxing film, radio soap operas, the domestic dramas of Lillian Hellman and Shirley Graham, and more. These writers and artists infused realist aesthetics into American mass culture to an unprecedented degree and also built on a tradition of realism in order to inject influential definitions of “the people” into American popular entertainment. Central to this book is the relationship between these mass cultural realisms and emergent notions of pluralism. Significantly, the book identifies three nascent pluralisms of the 1930s and 1940s: the New Deal pluralism of “We’re the People” in The Grapes of Wrath; the racially inclusive pluralism of Vice President Henry Wallace’s “The People’s Century”; and the proto-Cold War pluralism of Henry Luce’s “The American Century.”