Journal of Southern History

Historians have traditionally been interested in William Faulkner largely because Faulkner was interested in history. Faulkner's works take up the past, especially the southern past, as setting, theme, and even philosophy, as in the oft-quoted line from Requiem for a Nun (1951), "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Refreshingly, Faulkner and Print Culture allows historians to consider how Faulkner's career itself constitutes a meaningful historical subject. With a life and work spanning the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, Faulkner had experiences with modern print culture that help tell a broader American story. For scholars working in Faulkner studies, the [End Page 1030] collection is essential because it reconnects the author to the forces that shaped him and that he helped shape. For historians, southernists, and other Americanists, Faulkner and Print Culture helps reveal how deeply books and the print industries shaped the twentieth century.

Faulkner and Print Culture is both timely and pertinent to contemporary work not only in literary studies but also in book history, periodical studies, critical modernisms, and new regionalism. Drawn from papers presented at the lively annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in Oxford, Mississippi, the text is edited by a triad that ably supports its broad reach: Jay Watson, himself at the epicenter of Faulkner studies at the University of Mississippi; Jaime Harker, an expert in middlebrow and LGBTQ literary history; and James G. Thomas Jr., an editor and publisher on southern culture writ large. While some may imagine that the annual Faulkner conference features literary criticism alone, it offers a more complicated terrain in any year, but exceptionally so in 2015, when Faulkner and print culture was the theme. This resulting collection features scholars of Cold War culture (Greg Barnhisel), middlebrow literary culture (Harker and Yung-Hsing Wu), working-class and genre fiction (Erin A. Smith), book history and historical reception studies (Jay Satterfield and Sarah E. Gardner), film studies (Robert Jackson), periodical studies (Kristi Rowan Humphreys and Jennifer Nolan), biography (Carl Rollyson), and, yes, literary modernism (Kristin Fujie, John N. Duvall, Tim A. Ryan, and Mary A. Knighton).

One strength of the collection is its embrace of an "ecumenical approach" (p. xvi). After an opening cluster of six essays that take up the notorious novel Sanctuary (1931) as the perfect print culture case study, the remaining eight essays focus on a range of subjects spanning Faulkner's literary career from the 1930s through the 1950s. It makes sense for this collection to linger somewhat on the "horror" of the "potboiler" Sanctuary (pp. 11, 5). As the contributors show, the novel became the subject of its own critical fictions, but it should actually be understood as the work that best integrated Faulkner's brow-busting audience appeal: it was the "B-side" enjoyed even more than the hit single (p. xix). The collection is richly multidisciplinary, featuring, for example, the work of historians such as Sarah E. Gardner, whose essay on Sanctuary's reception illuminates the relationships between criticism and regionalism at this time. The collection also foregrounds work that is deeply historicist. Mary A. Knighton's essay, for example, is as much about the synergy of book illustration, modernist satire/parody, and the literary/artistic community in the interwar years as it is about Faulkner. Insofar as the essay resituates the author in the complicated swirl of art, influence, and the surprising irreverence of international modernism, it is a Faulkner essay.

The revelations of the collected essays entice the reader. With every chapter, we want to know more of this other Faulkner: the one who came in second in an Ellery Queen mystery writing competition, a feat that did at least as much for his career as Malcolm Cowley did, according to John N. Duvall. How many know that Faulkner was cast as an "American Tolstoy" and mobilized by the State Department to join the...