Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century

Faulkner criticism has long sought to understand the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha, and the ongoing Digital Yoknapatawpha project is encoding the texts into a database with sophisticated visualizations. The essays in Digitizing Faulkner explore how digital research can enhance our understanding of Faulkner's texts, including his characters, events, locations, and visualizations.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 10 June 2022
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

For over eighty years, scholars have dedicated themselves to exploring the fictional Mississippi county known as Yoknapatawpha, which serves as the setting for nearly all of William Faulkner's novels and over fifty short stories. One of the most ambitious endeavors in this regard is the ongoing Digital Yoknapatawpha project, an online initiative aimed at encoding the texts set in Faulkner's mythical county into a comprehensive database accompanied by sophisticated front-end visualizations. In their essay collection Digitizing Faulkner, the project contributors delve into their findings and insights into the potential implications of digital research for Faulkner studies and, by extension, other fields of literary inquiry.

The essays in this volume examine Faulkner's characters, events, locations, and visualizations, while also offering more theoretical reflections on the digital mapping of specific texts and stories. They explore 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 writings.

Through their contributions, the editors and authors of Digitizing Faulkner invite readers to engage with the evolving landscape of digital scholarship and to consider the ways in which new technologies are shaping our understanding of literature and culture. This collection serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, and enthusiasts alike, offering a fresh perspective on Faulkner's legacy and the enduring power of his words.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780813948294