“He is the one who is curious to me.”¹ Jason Compson Sr.’s offhand remark about Charles Bon identifies a persistent source of fascination in William Faulkner’sAbsalom, Absalom!“Curious” Bon certainly is: as Thomas Sutpen’s unacknowledged son and wrecker of his dynastic “design,” a man of French ethnicity and uncertain race, a languorous and fatalistic decadent, and “a Catholic of sorts” (AA94), he astonishes Yoknapatawpha County and provokes widely divergent responses from the novel’s characters. On the one hand, Bon suggests to some the horror of miscegenation—“the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister” (AA358), as...

In 1845 a group of seventeen free Creoles of color in New Orleans publishedLes Cenelles(The Holly Berries), a volume of lyric poems in French. The fruit of an endeavor that had begun two years before with the establishment ofL’album littéraire, the first “little magazine” in Louisiana,Les Cenellesemphasizes its communal production and adheres closely to a shared romantic aesthetic. Many poems in the collection imitate the French Romantic poets, taking up their characteristic meters and familiar themes: unrequited love, death and suicide, dreams and visions, the vagaries of longing and melancholy. Others are witty exercises: acrostics,...

Of the many attempts to explain the causes of the American Civil War, Mark Twain’s assigning of the blame to Sir Walter Scott is among the wryest—second, perhaps, only to Abraham Lincoln’s judgment that Harriet Beecher Stowe was responsible. According to Twain’s attack on Scott inLife on the Mississippi, at the beginning of the nineteenth century both North and South were committed to the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and progress consecrated by the American Revolution. Scott’s novels, however, would soon effect a cultural catastrophe below the Potomac and the Ohio:

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his...

Since the 1970s, when Kate Chopin’s fiction began to be rediscovered by feminist critics, the initial reception ofThe Awakeninghas passed into literary history as the story of a great but unsurprising atrocity. According to this narrative, a gifted writer, successful as a local colorist, is effectively silenced when she undertakes her greatest work because her contemporaries, blinded by the pieties of the genteel tradition, cannot recognize its value. In the preface to her first biography of Chopin, Emily Toth describes her own discovery ofThe Awakeningin these words: “I … was astonished that a woman in 1899...

Is Flannery O’Connor best viewed as a southern writer or as a Catholic writer? This question may appear willfully reductive, but it marks a divide that refuses to go away. Even after several decades of attention to her work, O’Connor’s critics can be grouped into those who read her primarily through a theological lens (often casting themselves as faithful exegetes or rebellious doubters) and those who focus primarily on her regional identification. If theological readings tend to dilute the cultural specificity of O’Connor’s work (and to become old quickly, as Michael Kreyling has complained), “southern” readings of O’Connor tend to...

During the decade from 1955 to 1965, the civil rights movement emerged as a major political force in the South, and despite fierce resistance from southern whites, it began to achieve success. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 abolished de jure racial segregation and ensured black southerners’ right to vote, thus sounding the death knell of what many had long identified as the “southern way of life.” For American Catholics, too, these were years of upheaval: John F. Kennedy’s election as president in 1960 was followed swiftly by the Second Vatican Council, which...