Professor of English
Research Areas: American literature; modernist studies; literary theory; literature of the U.S. South; William Faulkner
My research interests focus 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 William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), a study of Faulkner’s imagining of Southern place—regional, hemispheric, and global—as a coherent, if shifting project over the course of his career. I continue to teach and write on Faulkner, with two edited volumes for Cambridge UP appearing in 2015 (William Faulkner in Context and The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner.
My most recent book examines the ways some prominent works of U.S. fiction represent the disavowal of national reliance on the racial capitalism of plantation economies. Hidden in Plain Sight: Slave Capitalism in Poe, Hawthorne, and Joel Chandler Harris deals with nineteenth century writers, primarily Poe, Hawthorne, and Joel Chandler Harris, who reveal the habits of imagination that enabled the denial of forms of exploitation on which national prosperity was founded. In essays on Willa Cather and Cormac McCarthy I take up instances of the ways later US fiction confronts cultural modes of disavowal in the post-plantation South. I’ve continued this line of inquiry in a recent piece on racial mourning in Faulkner and Jesmyn Ward.
The historical side of my research has led to regular interdisciplinary team-teaching with Prof. Nina Silber of Boston University’s Department of History. We have taught undergraduate courses in Southern literature and modern American culture between the world wars, a graduate seminar in the US South in global context, and a first-year undergraduate seminar in the Kilachand Honors College on the historical contexts for representations of racial conflict in contemporary America.
I regularly teach courses in the modern American novel, Southern literature, literary theory, and modernist studies.
Selected Publications:
Hidden in Plain Sight: Representing Slave Capitalism in US Fiction (forthcoming)
William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
Editor, A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900-1950 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
The Play of Faulkner’s Language (Cornell University Press, 1982)
For a detailed academic bio and CV, please see Professor Matthews’s Department Profile.