John T. Matthews
Professor of English
My research concentrates on American literature, modernist studies, literary theory, and literature of the US South, with special attention to Faulkner. I’ve written several books on Faulkner, including The Play of Faulkner’s Language (Cornell UP, 1982), which took a post-structuralist approach to his work, and most recently William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), a study of Faulkner’s engagement with the imagination of Southern place—regional, hemispheric, and global—as a coherent, if variegated project over the course of his career. As my scholarship became more attentive to the historical ramifications of Faulkner’s fiction, I wrote a series of essays on questions of Southern plantation history, national modernization, and modernist aesthetics in Faulkner. I will continue to teach and write on Faulkner, with two edited volumes under contract for Cambridge UP (Faulkner in Context and A New Companion to Faulkner).