Southern Studies as Area Studies: Faulkner and Provincial Nationalism during the Cold War

Abstract

This chapter considers William Faulkner’s role as a literary giant and cultural ambassador during the Cold War and how his canonization into both American and southern literature reveals the usefulness of southern identity and values to the diplomatic ambitions of America on the world stage. His canonization help establish connections between area studies, American studies, and southern studies. This role is explored through close reading of Intruder in the Dust (1948), and Faulkner’s prominence in Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and Robert Jacob’s Southern Renascence (1953), the first published collection of scholarship on southern literature. Both cast the racial problems in the South as moral ones that can be solved by an exceptional culture of honor and tradition, which in turn bolsters American democratic values and dismisses race as a serious social and political problem at a moment when the country attempts to exert hegemonic influence on the world stage.