Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence

Contributions by Anita DeRouen, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, W. Ralph Eubanks, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Bernard T. Joy, John Wharton Lowe, Anne MacMaster, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Annette Trefzer, Jay Watson, and Ryoichi Yamane

Working closely in each other’s orbit in Mississippi, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright created lasting portraits of southern culture, each from a distinctly different vantage point. Taking into consideration their personal, political, and artistic ways of responding to the histories and realities of their time and place, Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence offers comparative scholarship that forges new connections--or, as Welty might say, traces new confluences--across texts, authors, identities, and traditions.

In the collection, contributors discuss Faulkner’s Light in August; Sanctuary; Go Down, Moses; As I Lay Dying; ＂A Rose for Emily＂; and ＂That Evening Sun＂; Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings; One Time, One Place; The Optimist’s Daughter; Losing Battles; ＂Why I Live at the P.O.＂; ＂Livvie＂; ＂Moon Lake＂; ＂The Burning＂; ＂Where Is the Voice Coming From?＂; and ＂The Demonstrators＂; and Wright’s Native Son; The Long Dream; 12 Million Black Voices; Black Boy; Lawd Today!; ＂The Man Who Lived Underground＂; ＂The Ethics of Living Jim Crow＂; and ＂Long Black Song.＂

Acknowledging that Mississippi ground was never level for any of the three writers, the fourteen essays in this volume turn from the familiar strategies of single-author criticism toward a mode of analysis more receptive to the fluid mergings of creative currents, placing Wright, Welty, and Faulkner in comparative relationship to each other as well as to other Mississippi writers such as Margaret Walker, Lewis Nordan, Natasha Trethewey, Jesmyn Ward, Steve Yarbrough, and Kiese Laymon. Doing so deepens and enriches our understanding of these literary giants and the Mississippi modernism they made together.

Annette Trefzer is professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is author of Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty’s Photographic Reflections and Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction and coeditor of Global Faulkner; Faulkner’s Sexualities; Faulkner and Mystery; Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text; and Faulkner and the Native South, all published by University Press of Mississippi, and her work has appeared in many journals. Jay Watson is Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. He is author of many publications, including William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity, Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner, and Fossil-Fuel Faulkner: Energy, Modernity, and the US South. He is also coeditor of multiple volumes in University Press of Mississippi’s Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series. James G. Thomas, Jr., is associate director for publications at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He is an editor of the twenty-four-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and The Mississippi Encyclopedia;coeditor (with Jay Watson) of the Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Series; and editor of Conversations with Barry Hannah. His work has appeared in Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi: The Twentieth Century, Southern Cultures, Southern Quarterly, and Living Blues.