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Laura Wilson

Laura Wilson is a fourth year PhD candidate at the University of Mississippi, having moved to the United States from Oxford, England to pursue research in William Faulkner. She presented a paper on Shreve McCannon as narrator in Absalom, Absalom!, at the 2016 Society for the Study of Southern Literature conference in Boston, and the material culture of Booker T. Washington in 2018. This summer, Laura was awarded a BAAS bursary at the inaugural Faulkner in the UK Colloquium, for her presentation on the controlled illegalities of Sanctuary; she also gave a paper on excavating slavery in ÒThe Fire and the HearthÓ at the 2018 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference. LauraÕs dissertation will examine the transfiguring power of capitalism in twentieth-century Southern literature through the work of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, and other contemporaries.

Review: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2018: Faulkner and Slavery

Review: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2018: Faulkner and Slavery, University of Mississippi, 22-26 July 2018 “What did slavery mean in the life, ancestry, environment, imagination, and career of William Faulkner?” This was the guiding question posed by the Call for Papers of this year’s annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, centered on the theme “Faulkner and Slavery,” and held at the University of Mississippi. As more work is undertaken across the globe to re-contextualize historical monuments, and to recover subjugated narratives, critical re-evaluations of the past are central to current scholarship; the time to critically re-assess Faulkner’s relationship to slavery is now. While on the surface, Faulkner’s own interaction with “the peculiar institution” might appear somewhat secondhand – the author was born in 1897, thirty-two years after the Emancipation Proclamation – the specter of slavery was never far from his life. Through his African American “Mammy”, Caroline Barr (born an enslaved person somewhere […]