Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference

The Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference is the oldest continuously running academic conference devoted to the work of an American writer.

The year 1974 marked a pair of important milestones in the study of William Faulkner. It was the fiftieth anniversary of The Marble Faun, Faulkner’s first published book, a long narrative poem that few read then and even fewer read now. It was also the publication year of Joseph Blotner’s two-volume, authorized life of the author, Faulkner: A Biography. As such, it seemed a propitious time to organize a correspondence course at the University of Mississippi, located in Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, to explore the significance of his work. Ann J. Abadie, at the time a consultant for the university’s continuing education program, collaborated with the chair of the English Department, James Webb, and another professor of English, Evans Harrington, to develop the course alongside other Faulkner-related ventures, such as local tours and faculty lectures for the increasing number of visitors to the area eager to learn more about Faulkner.

These separate projects soon coalesced into the idea of creating and hosting a continuing education event, a week-long summer conference “in the Land that Faulkner Made Legend,” as promotional materials put it, and the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference was born. Twice-born, in fact. Response to the event announcement was so overwhelming that the organizers had to schedule a second conference immediately following the first, with the featured speakers staying the extra week and repeating their lectures and presentations in order to to accommodate the more than three hundred people who registered for the event. The conference was such a success that the organizers decided to hold another one the following year, and it has been held every year since, with the exception of 2020, when it was canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Along the way, the conference has retained its outreach function, continuing to attract Faulkner fans and other members of the general public, even as it has developed a more robust and influential profile as a scholarly event, attracting teachers, critics, students, and academic specialists on the author’s work. In 1976, the University Press of Mississippi began publishing a collection of proceedings from the year’s conference, launching a series of volumes that have become vital reference works in the field of Faulkner studies. (Papers from the first two conferences were published in the University of Mississippi English Department journal Studies in English.) In the 1980s, the conference began circulating a call for papers and accepting speakers to complement the lineup of invited keynoters. In the 1990s, the conference format began to incorporate panel sessions featuring shorter papers in order to complement the keynote addresses and bring more voices, including those of emerging scholars, into the conference conversation. In addition to the academic program, sessions on teaching and collecting Faulkner, lectures and readings by acclaimed writers, rare and scholarly book exhibits, guided tours of North Mississippi (“Faulkner country”), film screenings and musical and theatrical performances, and remembrance sessions featuring local residents and Faulkner family members have enlivened and diversified the conference schedule.

Over its six decades, Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha has had three directors: Evans Harrington (1974–93), Donald M. Kartiganer (1994–2011), and Jay Watson (2012–25). The list of conference themes over these years offers a revealing window onto the evolution of literary and cultural studies and the questions and approaches that animate critics in those fields. The 1970s included topics such as “The South and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha: The Actual and the Apocryphal” and “The Maker and the Myth,” while the 1980s brought conferences on “Faulkner and Women,” “Faulkner and Race,” “Faulkner and Popular Culture,” and “Faulkner: The Craft of Fiction.” The following decade included conferences on “Faulkner and Ideology,” “Faulkner and Postmodernism,” “Faulkner and the Artist,” and “Faulkner and the Natural World.” With the turn to a new century came “Global Faulkner,” “Faulkner’s Sexualities,” “Faulkner and War,” and “Faulkner and Formalism: The Returns of the Text.” In the 2010s, conferencegoers pondered “Faulkner’s Geographies,” “Faulkner and the Black Literature of the Americas,” “Faulkner and Print Culture,” and “Faulkner and Slavery.” Despite Covid, the 2020s have already seen conferences on “Faulkner’s Modernisms,” “Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence,” “Queer Faulkner,” and “Faulkner’s Bodies,” along with a golden anniversary conference in 2024.

The conference’s long history and equally extensive library of scholarship offer continuing witness to the legacy of William Faulkner and the ability of his work to illuminate, provoke, and inspire generations of readers, both in and beyond the academy.