University of Georgia Press
William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape
Key Metrics
- Charles S Aiken
- University of Georgia Press
- Hardcover
- 9780820332192
- 9 X 6 X 1.1 inches
- 1.2 pounds
- Literary Criticism > American - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Charles S. Aiken, a native of Mississippi who was born a few miles from Oxford, has been thinking and writing about the geography of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County for more than thirty years. William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape is the culmination of that long-term scholarly project. It is a fresh approach to a much-studied writer and a provocative meditation on the relationship between literary imagination and place.
Four main geographical questions shape Aiken's journey to the family seat of the Compsons and the Snopeses. What patterns and techniques did Faulkner use--consciously or subconsciously--to convert the real geography of Lafayette County into a fictional space? Did Faulkner intend Yoknapatawpha to serve as a microcosm of the American South? In what ways does the historical geography of Faulkner's birthplace correspond to that of the fictional world he created? Finally, what geographic legacy has Faulkner left us through the fourteen novels he set in Yoknapatawpha?
With an approach, methodology, and sources primarily derived from historical geography, Aiken takes the reader on a tour of Faulkner's real and imagined worlds. The result is an informed reading of Faulkner's life and work and a refined understanding of the relation of literary worlds to the real places that inspire them.
Author Bio
Charles Aiken’s teaching interests are primarily in rural geography and regional geography, with emphasis on the American South. A versatile scholar, he has studied the agricultural changes which have come with the decline of King Cotton; the changes in rural settlement patterns resulting from the civil rights era and the Great Society programs; and the landscape of imagination in the works of southern writers.
Aiken is a past president of the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers. His book The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1998.
Source: The University of Tennessee
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