Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

Valuable scholarship from a leading textual critic 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 Souths 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. His essays in Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition maintain an abiding interest in Polks major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the works 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 works grand design is a crucial aspect of Polks scholarship. Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition collects Polks essays from the late-1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the Souths literary heritage, the volume asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis. Noel Polk is professor of English at Mississippi State University and editor of the Mississippi Quarterly. From 1981 to 2006, he edited the Library of Americas complete edition of William Faulkners novels. He is the author of Outside the Southern Myth; Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner; and Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work.