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Crockett Johnson (born David Johnson Leisk, 1906–1975) and Ruth Krauss (1901–1993) were a husband-and-wife team that created such popular children’s books such as The Carrot Seed and How to Make an Earthquake. Separately, Johnson created the enduring children’s classic Harold and the Purple Crayon and the groundbreaking comic strip Barnaby. Krauss wrote over a dozen children’s books illustrated by others, and pioneered the use of spontaneous, loose-tongued kids in children’s literature. Together, Johnson and Krauss’s style—whimsical writing, clear and minimalist drawing, and a child’s point-of-view—is among the most revered and influential in children’s literature and cartooning, inspiring the work of Maurice Sendak, Charles M. Schulz, Chris Van Allsburg, and Jon Scieszka. This critical biography examines their lives and careers, including their separate achievements when not collaborating. Using correspondence, sketches, contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts, archived and personal interviews, the book draws a portrait of a couple whose output encompassed children’s literature, comics, graphic design, and the fine arts. It examines their mentorship of now-famous illustrator Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are), as well as the couple’s appeal to adult contemporaries such as Duke Ellington and Dorothy Parker. Defiantly leftist in an era of McCarthyism and Cold War paranoia, Johnson and Krauss risked collaborations that often contained subtly rendered liberal themes. Indeed, they were under FBI surveillance for years. Their legacy of considerable success invites readers to dream and to imagine.

Flannery O'Connor once noted, “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” Her railroading metaphor wittily captures much of the respect and unease William Faulkner's example brought the worldwide community of authors. Few other writers have exerted as profound an influence on literature as Faulkner. This book documents the scope of his influence in the twentieth century through the words of those writers themselves. The book offers a survey attempting to capture exactly what Faulkner meant to his literary peers and colleagues both in the United States and abroad. Many major American writers sound off here, as well as important figures from France, England, Japan, and South America. Some speak about his technical virtuosity and how this expertise has directly influenced them, and others express the difficulties of trying to escape his example. A few even criticize him for what they see as artistic failures. The variety of responses demonstrate that Faulkner created an unavoidable power in his own time and remains a permanent force in literature.

Appearing first as a weekly serial in the Christian Herald, Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna was first published in book form in 1913. This popular story of an impoverished orphan girl who travels from America's western frontier to live with her wealthy maternal Aunt Polly in the fictional east coast town of Beldingsville went through forty-seven printings in seven years and remains in print today in its original version, as well as in various translations and adaptations. The story's enduring appeal lies in Pollyanna's sunny personality and in her glad game, her playful attempt to accentuate the positive in every situation. In celebration of its centenary, this collection of thirteen original essays examines a wide variety of the novel's themes and concerns, as well as adaptations in film, manga, and translation. In this volume, internationally respected and emerging scholars of children's literature consider Porter's work from modern critical perspectives. Chapters focus primarily on the novel itself but also examine Porter's sequel, Pollyanna Grows Up, and the various film versions and translations of the novel. With backgrounds in children's literature, cultural and film studies, philosophy, and religious studies, these scholars extend critical thinking about Porter's work beyond the thematic readings that have dominated previous scholarship.

The nine essays of this volume explore a variety of ways to understand Faulkner’s influence by and imbrication in cinematic practice and the workings of the American film industry. The introduction places the topic of Faulkner and film in a critical and scholarly context, and the essays that follow work through the approach by way of Faulkner’s experiences as a screenwriter, his work in Hollywood’s influence on his fiction, his response to cinematic models as evidenced in his novels, and the ways Faulkner’s texts anticipated or even shaped media like television, the internet, and digital media. The authors take on longstanding questions at the heart of understandings of Modernism and its cultural context, showing the several ways in which Faulkner’s writing both responded to the cinema as well as shapes our understanding of film’s history and, potentially, the future of both Faulkner and film studies.

William Faulkner remains a historian's writer. A distinguished roster of historians has referenced Faulkner in their published work. They are drawn to him as a fellow historian, a shaper of narrative reflections on the meaning of the past; as a historiographer, a theorist, and dramatist of the fraught enterprise of doing history; and as a historical figure himself, especially following his mid-century emergence as a public intellectual after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This volume brings together historians and literary scholars to explore the many facets of Faulkner's relationship to history: the historical contexts of his novels and stories; his explorations of the historiographic imagination; his engagement with historical figures from both the regional and national past; his influence on professional historians; his pursuit of alternate modes of temporal awareness; and the histories of print culture that shaped the production, reception, and criticism of Faulkner's work. The chapters draw on the history of development in the Mississippi Valley, the construction of Confederate memory, the history and curriculum of Harvard University, twentieth-century debates over police brutality and temperance reform, the history of modern childhood, and the literary histories of anti-slavery writing and pulp fiction to illuminate Faulkner's work. Others explore the meaning of Faulkner's fiction for such professional historians as C. Vann Woodward and Albert Bushnell Hart. In these ways and more, the book offers fresh insights into one of the most persistent and long-recognized elements of the Mississippian's artistic vision.

William Faulkner’s first ventures into print culture began far from the world of highbrow publishing with which he is typically associated—the world of New York publishing houses, little magazines, and literary prizes—though they would come to encompass that world as well. This collection explores Faulkner’s multifaceted engagements, as writer and reader, with the US and international print cultures of his era, along with the ways in which these cultures have mediated his relationship with a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century audiences. The essays gathered here 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. Six contributors focus on Faulkner’s sensational 1931 novel Sanctuary as a case study illustrating 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. Faulkner’s midcentury critical rebranding as a strictly highbrow modernist, disdainful of the market and impervious to literary trends or the corruption of commerce, has buried the much more interesting complexity of his ongoing engagements with print culture and its engagements with him. This collection will spur critical interest in the intersection of Faulkner’s writing career and the unrespectable, experimental, and audacious realities of interwar and Cold War print culture.

At the turn of the millennium, the Martinican novelist and critic Édouard Glissant offered the bold prediction that “Faulkner’s oeuvre will be made complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans,” a goal that “will be achieved by a radically ‘other’ reading.” In the spirit of Glissant’s prediction, Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas places William Faulkner’s literary oeuvre in dialogue with a hemispheric canon of black writing from the U.S. and the Caribbean. The volume’s seventeen essays and poetry selections chart lines of engagement, dialogue, and reciprocal resonance between Faulkner and his black precursors, contemporaries, and successors in the Americas. Contributors place Faulkner’s work in reciprocally illuminating conversation with writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Randall Kenan, Edward P. Jones, and Natasha Trethewey, and with the musical artistry of Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton. In addition, a quintet of emerging African American poets offer their own creative responses to Faulkner’s writings, characters, verbal art, and historical example. In these ways, Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas develops a comparative approach to the Faulkner oeuvre that goes beyond the compelling but also limiting question of influence—who read whom, whose works draw from whose—to explore the confluences between Faulkner and black writing in the hemisphere: the common questions framed in their bodies of work, the responses to common problems, precursors, and events.

The recent “spatial turn” in social theory and cultural studies opens up exciting new possibilities for the study and teaching of William Faulkner’s work. 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 Faulkner’s artistic vision, the eleven essays in Faulkner’s 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 Faulkner’s writings. Individual contributions examine the influence of the plantation as a land-use regime on Faulkner’s imagination of north Mississippi geography; the emergence of “micro-Souths” in the urban North of Faulkner’s fiction; the enlistment of the author’s work in the geopolitics of the cultural Cold War; the historical and literary affiliations between Faulkner’s Deep South and Greater Mexico; the local and idiosyncratic as alternatives to region and nation in modeling space and place in Faulkner’s work; the unique geography that Faulkner encountered in the literary culture of New Orleans; the uses of feminist geography to trace the interplay of gender, space, and movement in Faulkner’s fiction; and the circulation of Caribbean and “Black South” spaces and itineraries through Faulkner’s masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner’s Geographies seeks to redraw the boundaries of Faulkner studies by bringing new attention to the function of space, place, mapping, and mobility in his work.

Employing the language of standard literary criticism, this study treats two hundred years of distinctive writing connected to Louisiana in both French (nineteenth century chiefly) and English, from the early 1800s to the early 2000s, by Louisiana Creoles, their descendants, and sympathetic outsiders. The focus is on New Orleans and the surrounding area (Cajun folklore, entirely different, and recent Cajun texts are not considered). This substantial body of Creole literature has remained undervalued and its general trends and characteristics largely unexamined. Directed to literary scholars, historians, and students, the book treats authors chronologically and sometimes by genre. The singularity of Louisiana Creole culture and circumstances is brought out by two introductory chapters, the first a historical sketch; subsequent chapters examine important trends and authors. Among them are the Rouquette brothers, Alfred Mercier, Victor Séjour, Camille Thierry, Charles Testut, George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Grace King, Donald Demarest, and Brenda Marie Osbey. Pertinent publishing facts and personal information on authors are furnished, as well as summaries and descriptions of texts; generic and other aesthetic matters are considered in depth, and judgments are offered. Social questions are treated principally in the contexts in which the works were produced and the terms set forth at the time, rather than through a filtering ideological vision of today. Careful attention is paid to the mixed-race Gens de couleur libres or Free People of Color and their literary achievements in the nineteenth century. Connections with France and French literary movements are emphasized.

The Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have been instrumental in disseminating and popularizing ‘rapture theology’ in the contemporary period, selling some 65 million copies worldwide and revitalizing the evangelical publishing industry in the U.S. Plotting Apocalypse develops an in-depth critical analysis of LaHaye and Jenkins’ bestselling series, including the sequel and prequels. In particular, the book unpicks the paradoxical conception of individual agency found in the series, which claims that all humans are powerless before an almighty God while simultaneously stressing the importance of personal responsibility and individual autonomy. Through attentive close readings underpinned by an understanding of the nuances and subtleties of contemporary evangelical prophecy belief, the book shows how the Left Behind series functions as a space where the conundrum of evangelical agency can be staged and, perhaps, resolved.

This book describes and discusses the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education: Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Brad Watson, Daniel Woodrell, and Steve Yarbrough. Their twenty-first-century colleagues are Wiley Cash, Peter Farris, Skip Horack, Michael Farris Smith, Barb Johnson, and Jesmyn Ward. The book starts by distinguishing Rough South writers from such writers as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Younger writers who followed Harry Crews were born into and write about the Rough South. These writers undercut stereotypes, forcing readers to see the working poor differently. Other chapters begin with those on Crews and Cormac McCarthy, major influences on an entire generation. Later chapters address members of both groups—the self-educated and the college-educated. Both groups share a clear understanding of the value of working-class southerners.

While recent scholarship has amply demonstrated that Eudora Welty was a writer with cosmopolitan sensibilities and progressive politics, she continues to be categorized as a “regionalist” writer whose works valorize the white privilege from which she benefited. To assume this is Welty’s intention is to misread much of her work. This volume offers ways to navigate Welty’s sometimes complex prose and enriches readers’ understanding of Welty’s era and region. It offers teachers less simplistic approaches to the stories most frequently taught, and it steers them to less familiar texts. In addition, this book seeks to move Welty beyond a discussion of region to reflect new scholarship that “remaps” her work onto a larger canvas. Now more than ever, teachers need guidance in navigating the critical landscape and in preparing to introduce Welty texts to students in varied teaching settings and diverse classrooms. As the essays in this book demonstrate, Welty’s works are being read and taught across the globe. Her works enrich courses taught at many levels, from high school to community college to the university level. This book gives readers a window into the teaching practices of distinguished and veteran scholars as well as those at the beginning of their careers. Their work can guide instructors new to Welty as well as seasoned Welty scholars who are eager for fresh classroom approaches and new material to offer a new generation of students.

Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning includes essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author’s literary production and including her very latest works—the theatrical production Desdemona, and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrison’s work. In fact, in Home we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison’s fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to or engage themes prevalent in Home and to use quotes from this latest novel as headings for the five different sections of this volume. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in works that have now become classics in world literature. Not only do they enhance the breadth and depth of Morrison studies but they shift the paradigms for scholarship in religion, history, classical mythology, psychology, folklore, law and philosophy. The essays are divided into 5 sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from Home, and framed by two original, previously unpublished poems, written specifically for this volume in honor of Ms. Morrison: Rita Dove’s “The Buckeye” and Sonia Sanchez’s “Abayere Babo, Abayere Babo, Abayere Babo.” (235 words)

Hard-boiled writer Raymond Chandler created his detective Philip Marlowe not as the idealisation of heroic individualism as is commonly perceived, but as an authentic individual subjected to real psychological frailties resulting from his traumatic experiences during World War One. Marlowe’s characterisation goes beyond the traditional chivalric readings and can instead be interpreted as an authentic representation of a traumatised veteran in American society. Substituting the horror of the trenches for the corruption of the city, Chandler’s disillusioned protagonist and his representation of an uncaring American society resonate strongly with the dislocation of the Lost Generation. Consequently, it is profitable to consider Chandler as both a generic writer and a genuine literary figure. This book re-examines important primary documents highlighting extensive discrepancies in existing biographical narratives of Chandler’s war experience, and unveils an account that is significantly different from that of his biographers. Utilizing psychological behavioural interpretation to interrogate Chandler’s novels demonstrates the variety of post-traumatic symptoms that tormented Chandler and his protagonist. A close reading of his personal papers reveals the war trauma subconsciously encoded in Marlowe’s characterisation. This conflation of the hard-boiled style and war experience – a war noir – has influenced many contemporary crime writers, particularly in the traumatic aftermath of the Vietnam War. This work offers a new understanding of Chandler’s traumatic war experience, how that experience established the traditional archetype of detective fiction, and how this reading of his work allows Chandler to transcend generic limitations to be recognised as a key twentieth century literary figure.

When the United States entered World War I, parts of the country had developed industries, urban cultures, and democratic political systems, but the South lagged behind, remaining an impoverished, agriculture region. Despite New South boosterism, the culture of the early twentieth-century South was comparatively artistically arid. Yet, southern writers dominated the literary marketplace by the 1920s and 1930s. World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity before the South fully modernized. This shortfall created an inherent tension between the region’s existing agricultural social structure and the processes of modernization, leading to distal modernism, a form of writing that combines elements of modernism to depict non-modern social structures. Critics have struggled to formulate explanations for the eruption of modern southern literature, sometimes called the Southern Renaissance. Pinpointing World War I as the catalyst, this book argues southern modernism was not a self-generating outburst of writing, but a response to the disruptions modernity generated in the region. World War I and Southern Modernism examines dozens of works of literature by writers, including William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, and Claude McKay, that depict the South during the war. Topics explored in the book include contact between the North and the South, southerners who served in combat, and the developing southern economy. This book also provides a new lens for this argument, taking a closer look at African Americans in the military and changing gender roles.