Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha 2015

“Faulkner and Print Culture”

July 19-23, 2015

Announcement and Call For Papers

http://www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner

William Faulkner’s first published works were drawings that appeared in his high school and college yearbooks and poems and stories that appeared in newspapers. His first book, The Marble Faun, was published in 1924 by a vanity press. His artistic forays into print culture, in other words, began far from the world of highbrow literary publishing with which he is usually associated—the world of New York publishing houses like Boni and Liveright or Random House and little magazines like The Double-Dealer—though with time they would come to encompass that world as well. With this in mind, the 42^nd annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha conference at the University of Mississippi will explore Faulkner’s multifaceted engagements, as writer and reader, producer and consumer, with the print cultures of his era, along with the ways in which these cultures have mediated his relationship with a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century readerships.

Topics could include, but are by no means limited to: Faulkner as reader and book collector; Faulkner on the periodical market (in the pulps, the “slicks,” little magazines, college literary magazines, and newspapers); Faulkner and his publishers (Boni and Liveright, Cape and Smith, Random House, the Modern Library, Signet, and later reprint ventures, from pulp and mass market paperback to trade and Book-of-the-Month Club adaptations and scholarly editions); Faulkner in the history of the book (cover art and jacket matter, book design and layout, advertising campaigns, publishing tie-ins, and other marketing strategies); Faulkner’s engagement with popular literary trends and genres (detective novels, bootlegger novels, World War I protest novels, novels of the soil, race problem novels, “backwoods” fiction, etc.); Faulkner’s relationships with literary tastemakers and cultural arbiters like William Stanley Braithwaite, Charles Henri Ford, Alexander Woolcott, Clifton Fadiman, Malcolm Cowley, Oprah Winfrey, and so on; Faulkner’s translations and other transformations in international print cultures; his diverse and changing readerships, during his lifetime and beyond; and the many afterlives of Faulkner in print: at libraries, in book clubs and reading groups, and via ebooks and other digital resources.

We especially encourage full panel proposals for 75-minute conference sessions. Such proposals should include a one-page overview of the session topic or theme, followed by two-page abstracts for each of the panel papers to be included. We also welcome individually submitted two-page abstracts for 20-minute panel papers and individually submitted manuscripts for 40-minute plenary papers. Panel papers consist of approximately 2,500 words and will be considered by the conference program committee for possible inclusion in the conference volume published by the University Press of Mississippi. Plenary papers, which should be prepared using the 16th edition of the University of Chicago Manual of Style as a guide, consist of approximately 5,000-6,000 words and will appear in the published volume.

Session proposals, panel paper abstracts, and plenary paper submissions must be submitted by January 31, 2015, preferably through e-mail attachment. Authors whose plenary papers are selected for presentation at the conference will receive a conference registration waiver. All manuscripts, proposals, abstracts, and inquiries should be addressed to Jay Watson, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, P.O. Box 1848, University, MS 38677-1848. E-mail: jwatson@olemiss.edu. Decisions for all submissions will be made by March 15, 2015.