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American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World is a major contemporary survey of landscapes in art and literature of the United States, especially the American South. Inspired by William Dunlap's extraordinary landscape Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America and a collection of forty paintings and photographs by Southern artists, this volume brings together artists, authors, and scholars to present new perspectives on art and literature both past and present. The volume includes art and text from artists John Alexander, Jason Bouldin, William Dunlap, Carlyle Wolfe Lee, Ke Francis, Linda Burgess, Randy Hayes; photographers Sally Mann, Ed Croom, and Huger Foote; museum directors Betsy Bradley, Jane Livingston, and Julian Rankin; and authors W. Ralph Eubanks, John Grisham, J. Richard Gruber, Jessica B. Harris, Lisa Howorth, Julia Reed, Natasha Trethewey, Curtis Wilkie, Joseph M. Pierce, and Drew Gilpin Faust. This diverse group explores major eras of American history portrayed in Dunlap's painting, a landscape that evokes the displacement and genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the Civil War, and William Faulkner's fiction. They examine the history of landscape art in America, connecting art with the works of major writers like William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Natasha Trethewey, and Jesmyn Ward. In eighteen new essays written during the pandemic and since the events of January 6, 2021, the essayists emphasize how the key issues Dunlap addressed in his 1987 artwork have become part of the national discourse and make his work even more vital today.

The recent spatial turn in social theory and cultural studies opens up exciting new possibilities for the study of William Faulkner's 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 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's geography; the emergence of “micro-Souths” as a product of modern migratory patterns in the urban North of Faulkner's fiction; the enlistment of the author's work in the geopolitics of the cultural Cold War during the 1950s; the historical and literary affiliations between Faulkner's 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 Faulkner's masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom! By bringing new attention to the function of space, place, mapping, and movement in his literature, Faulkner's Geographies seeks to redraw the very boundaries of Faulkner studies.

Considering that he worked a stint as a screenwriter, it will come as little surprise that Faulkner has often been called the most cinematic of novelists. Faulkner's novels were produced in the same high period as the films of classic Hollywood, a reason itself for considering his work alongside this dominant form. Beyond their era, though, Faulkner's novels—or the ways in which they ask readers to see as well as feel his world—have much in common with film. That Faulkner was aware of film and that his novels'own “thinking” betrays his profound sense of the medium and its effects broadens the contexts in which he can be considered. In a range of approaches, the contributors consider Faulkner's career as a scenarist and collaborator in Hollywood, the ways his screenplay work and the adaptations of his fiction informed his literary writing, and how Faulkner's craft anticipates, intersects with, or reflects upon changes in cultural history across the lifespan of cinema. Drawing on film history, critical theory, archival studies of Faulkner's screenplays and scholarship about his work in Hollywood, the nine essays show a keen awareness of literary modernism and its relation to film.

Contributions by Hosam Aboul-Ela, Susan V. Donaldson, Richard Godden, Michael Gorra, Lisa Hinrichsen, Donald M. Kartiganer, Sarah Mahurin, Sean McCann, Noel Polk, Esther Sánchez-Pardo, Annette Trefzer, Rachel Watson, and Philip Weinstein Faulkner and Mystery presents a wide spectrum of compelling arguments about the role and function of mystery in William Faulkner's fiction. Twelve new essays approach the question of what can be known and what remains a secret in the narratives of the Nobel laureate. Scholars debate whether or not Faulkner's work attempts to solve mysteries or celebrate the enigmas of life and the elusiveness of truth. Scholars scrutinize Faulkner's use of the contemporary crime and detection genre as well as novels that deepen a plot rather than solve it. Several essays are dedicated to exploring the narrative strategies and ideological functions of Faulkner's take on the detective story, the classic “whodunit.” Among Faulkner's novels most interested in the format of detection is Intruder in the Dust, which assumes a central role in this essay collection. Other contributors explore the thickening mysteries of racial and sexual identity, particularly the enigmatic nature of his female and African American characters. Questions of insight, cognition, and judgment in Faulkner's work are also at the center of essays that explore his storytelling techniques, plot development, and the inscrutability of language itself.

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 Faulkner's Sexualities, 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 his 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? This volume wrestles with these questions and relates them to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.

In 1952, Faulkner noted the exceptional nature of the South when he characterized it as “the only really authentic region in the United States, because a deep indestructible bond still exists between man and his environment.” The essays collected in Faulkner and the Ecology of the South explore Faulkner's environmental imagination, seeking what Ann Fisher-Wirth calls the : “ecological counter-melody” of his texts. “Ecology” was not a term in common use outside the sciences in Faulkner's time. However, the word “environment” seems to have held deep meaning for Faulkner. Often he repeated his abiding interest in “man in conflict with himself, with his fellow man, or with his time and place, his environment.” Eco-criticism has led to a renewed interest among literary scholars for what in this volume Cecelia Tichi calls, “humanness within congeries of habitats and environments.” Philip Weinstein draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Eric Anderson argues that Faulkner's fiction has much to do with ecology in the sense that his work often examines the ways in which human communities interact with the natural world, and François Pitavy sees Faulkner's wilderness as unnatural in the ways it represents reflections of man's longings and frustrations. Throughout these essays, scholars illuminate in fresh ways the precarious ecosystem of Yoknapatawpha County.