288 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Tim A. Ryan is associate professor of English at Northern Illinois University and the author of Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery Since “Gone with the Wind.”
“A scintillating new study. . . . [I] have long been impressed not just by [Ryan’s] interpretive gifts in the matter of blues lyric utterance, but by the unerring clarity and vigor of his writing; both those strengths are vividly present here. . . . Ryan is leading the way, brilliantly, gifting us with some of the very best writing about the blues we are likely to see.”—Southern Register
“The first book-length work of its kind, Yoknapatawpha Blues provides a nuanced, insightful look at the cultural, aesthetic, and political connections between Faulkner and southern roots music. Along the way, Ryan revises many previously held assumptions and offers surprising new readings of the layered relationship of Faulkner and the Delta blues.”—Style
“[Yoknapatawpha Blues] will appeal to scholars and non-specialists alike, because Ryan’s prose is crisp, his arguments lucid. . . . This is a book about where American modernity came from, and though the methods are scholarly, Yoknapatawpha Blues underscores that Faulkner and the blues belong to everybody.”—Los Angeles Review
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