A highly productive year in William Faulkner scholarship includes an impressive new biography as well as a high-profile work of criticism for the trade market that examines the resonance of the Civil War in his writings. Several significant projects consider Faulkner in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and the alt-right movement that have defined the poles of contemporary politics, and others apply new, innovative theoretical methods, demonstrating that almost any approach finds opportunity in a canon which continues to prove itself relevant to current events and modes of criticism.
The Library of America has issued African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, ed. Kevin Young. For the period 1900–1950 the coverage of this volume includes many lesser-known poets in addition to more famous figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Separate volumes of selected poetry by Countee Cullen (2013) and Gwendolyn Brooks (2005) are already part of the Library of America program, and the works of some of the figures in this volume have also appeared in the two volumes of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (2000). However, this new volume offers a much wider range of writers and would be useful in courses on African American poetry for the period covered by this chapter. The book is a welcome and timely addition to resources for teaching and scholarship. In Modernism’s Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics ( Johns Hopkins) Ben Glaser responds to High Modernism’s rejection of meter. In his view “the disavowal of meter” turns out to be a “cover for modern poetry’s nostalgia for earlier metrical culture, anxiety about its marginality and limited readership, and dependence on literary criticism.” The impact of Victorian poetry is more prevalent than many modernist poets and critics recognized or admitted. In fact, “poets reevaluated the legacies of poetic culture and poetry as cultural capital
