Digitizing Faulkner
Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century

Theresa M. Towner (Edited by)

9780813948300

Paperback / softback, published 30 June 2022

230 pages, 2 maps, 3 tables 5 - -
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.155 kg

This book offers new ways of thinking about the demographics of Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha, fresh insights into Faulkner’s adaptation of modernist narrative techniques, and a substantial modification of our understanding of the various themes and events in Faulkner’s work—not only in the major novels but throughout his larger oeuvre. The collection’s most unique contribution, however, is in demonstrating how digital humanities projects can both enable and meaningfully inform carefully researched scholarship in traditional formats. Digitizing Faulkner makes and signals significant headway in fulfilling the promise of digital humanities."- Wes Hamrick, Digital Humanities Fellow, Greenhouse Studio, University of Connecticut

For more than eighty years, Faulkner criticism has attempted to ""see all Yoknapatawpha,"" the fictional Mississippi county in which the author set all but four of his novels as well as more than fifty short stories. One of the most ambitious of these attempts is the ongoing Digital Yoknapatawpha, an online project that is encoding the texts set in Faulkner’s mythical county into a complex database with sophisticated front-end visualizations. In Digitizing Faulkner, the contributors to the project share their findings and reflections on what digital research can mean for Faulkner studies and, by example, other bodies of literature.

The essays examine Faulkner’s characters, events, locations, and visualizations, as well as offering more theoretical reflections on digitally mapping specific texts and stories, including the pedagogical implications of this digital approach. Digitizing Faulkner explores how a twenty-first-century research tool intersects with twentieth-century sensibilities, ideologies, behaviors, and material cultures to modify and enhance our understanding of Faulkner’s texts.