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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.

The matter of money touches the writer's life at every point:in the need to make ends meet, in daily dealings with agents, editors, and publishers, and in the choice of subject matter and the lineaments of the imagined world.William Faulkner was no exception.The people and communities he wrote about were deeply entangled in personal, local, regional, national, and even global networks of industry, commerce, and finance, as was the author himself, whose economic biography often followed, but occasionally bucked, the tumultuous economic trends of the twentieth century.This collection brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the economic contexts of Faulkner's life and work, to follow the proverbial money toward new insights into the Nobel laureate and new questions about his art.Essays address economies of debt and gift-giving in Intruder in the Dust; the legacies of commodity fetishism in Sanctuary and of twentieth-century capitalism's financial turn in The Town; the pegging of self-esteem to financial acumen in the career of The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson; the representational challenges posed by poverty and failure in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend tales; the economics of regional readership and the Depression-era literary market; the aesthetic, monetary, and psychological rewards of writing for Hollywood; and the author's role as benefactor to an aspiring African American college student in the 1950s.The Faulkner we meet in these pages is among modern literature's most incisive and encyclopedic critics of what one contemporary theorist calls the madness of economic reason.

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.

With the rise of new scholarly paradigms in the study of Native American histories and cultures, and the emergence of the Native South as a key concept in US southern studies, the time is more than ripe for a critical reassessment of Native sites, characters, communities, customs, narratives, ways of knowing, and other indigenous elements in the writings of William Faulkner—and of Faulkner’s significance for Native American writers, artists, and intellectuals. From new insights into the Chickasaw sources and far-reaching implications of Faulkner’s fictional place-name “Yoknapatawpha,” to discussions that reveal the potential for indigenous land-, family-, and story-based worldviews to deepen understanding of Faulkner’s fiction (including but not limited to the novels and stories he devoted explicitly to Indian topics), the eleven essays of this volume take the critical analysis of Faulkner’s Native South and the Native South’s Faulkner beyond no-longer generative assessments of the historical accuracy of his Native representations or the colonial hybridity of his Indian characters, turning instead to indigenous intellectual culture for new models, problems, and questions to bring to Faulkner studies. Along the way, readers are treated to illuminating comparisons between Faulkner’s writings and the work of a number of Native American authors, filmmakers, tribal leaders, and historical figures. Faulkner and the Native South brings together Native and non-Native scholars in a stimulating and often surprising critical dialogue about the indigenous wellsprings of Faulkner’s creative energies and about Faulkner’s own complicated presence in Native American literary history.

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.

This book argues that depression-era authors contributed to the development of modern environmental thought in three distinct ways. First, they began recognizing as never before the devastating and even apocalyptic effects that humans can have on the environment, particularly in response to the period’s dust storms, flooding, and other human-created ecological disasters. Next, they acknowledged the ecological importance of nonhuman nature, including animal “predators” and “pests,” as conservationists were beginning to do during the period. And lastly, they laid the groundwork for what we now refer to as “environmental justice” by directly connecting environmental exploitation with racial, economic, and gender inequality. To illustrate the reach of environmental thought during the period, the first three chapters of the book focus on different geographical landscapes, including the wilderness, rural, and urban. The last chapter examines the period’s growing concern over the effects of technology on the human and nonhuman world. Ultimately, The Green Depression illustrates the importance of depression-era literature to the development of the modern environmentalist and environmental justice movements. It also contributes to a growing body of scholarship that identifies the importance of environmental thought to the literature and culture of African Americans and other minority groups as well as in considering urban landscapes and other built environments. Finally, the book seeks to initiate a conversation to consider how experiences and ideas from the period have influenced and can inform responses to the intersections of environmental, social, and economic issues in our own time.

Millions of Southerners left the South in the 20th Century in a mass migration that has had a lasting impact on the U.S. Leaving the South focuses on narratives by and about those who left and how those narratives challenged concepts of Southern nationhood and remade how Southernness is interpreted and represented. Identifying “the South” as an idea, this study works under the assumption that because borders are social constructs, movements of people across borders are controlled not only by physical barriers, but also by the narratives that define that movement. Framed with a look back to the Southern history of border building and a look ahead to the impact of borders in the 21^st Century, Leaving the South focuses on 20^th century Southern Border Narratives in prose, poetry, visual arts, and music and how they were used to create group affiliation, encourage divisiveness, and formulate and perpetuate new individual and group identities. Taking an expansive approach, this book crosses temporal, textual, gendering, and racial boundaries in order to examine the parallel, intersecting, and divergent narrative paths of various groups of Southerners as they left the South. In a time of calls for building a wall between the United States and Mexico, and growing nationalistic movements and isolationist tendencies around the globe, Leaving the South reflects on that friction between the human capacities to, on the one hand, build walls and, on the other, to break them down.

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.

Peculiar Whiteness argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as ‘white trash’ have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety-inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or with other troubling conditions such as physical difference. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., ‘white trash,’ tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, the book analyzes how we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to re-categorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of ‘white trash.’

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.

Flannery O’Connor’s work can be unsettling to read, inviting a wide range of responses because of her peculiar mixture of violence, grace, and humor. However, a few persistent readerly habits have shaped popular and critical understandings of Flannery O’Connor, overly narrowing interpretations of her work. This collection seeks to disrupt those habits, reconsidering a giant of southern literature in a range of ways. The essays featured here begin with new methodologies, including object-oriented ontology and "crip-queer" theory, among others. Some essays in this collection introduce new contexts, like gothic science fiction, by way of approaching O’Connor. Others draw out unlikely comparisons with writers not normally considered alongside O’Connor, including Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, and Sylvia Plath. And in the final section, two essays reevaluate familiar arguments regarding O’Connor’s legacy, both in terms of her legal estate and as a formative figure in the rise of the creative writing workshop. Thus, this volume pursues questions that productively complicate the commonplace assumptions of O’Connor scholarship while also circling back to some old questions that are due for new attention.

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.

The formalized study of southern literature in the mid-twentieth century is an example of scholars formalizing the study of modernist aesthetics in order to suppress leftist politics and sentiments in literature and art. This formalized, institutional study was initiated in a climate in which intellectuals were under societal pressure, created by the Cold War, to praise literary and artistic production representative of American values. This even in southern literary studies occurred roughly at the same time that the United States sought to extoll the virtues of America’s free, democratic society abroad. In this manner, southern studies and American studies become two sides of the same coin. Intellectuals and writers that promoted American exceptionalism dealt with the rising Civil Rights Movement and the nation’s complicated history with race and poverty by casting the issues as moral rather than political problems that were distinctly southern and could therefore be corrected by drawing on “exceptional” southern values, such as tradition and honor. The result of such maneuvering is that over the course of the twentieth century, “south” becomes more than a geographical identity. Ultimately, “south” becomes a socio-political and cultural identity associated with modern conservatism with no geographical boundaries. Rather than a country divided into south and north, the United States is divided in the twenty-first century into red and blue states. The result of using southern literature to present southern values as appropriate, moderate values for the whole nation during the Cold War is to associate these values with nationalism and conservatism today.

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)