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, ... More

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.