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² Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982)Google Scholar, 16.

³ Hutner, Gordon, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Greeson, Jennifer Rae, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Duck, Leigh Anne, The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006)Google Scholar; and Romine, Scott, The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁵ Eysteinsson, Astradur, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁶ Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar, 25.

⁷ The transnational turn in modernist studies challenges the constriction of nationalist boundaries on literary aesthetics, but the focus seems to remain on common experiences of urbanization and industrialization on a global scale. See Walkowitz, Rebecca, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Berman, Jessica, Modernism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Doyle, Laura and Winkiel, Laura, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁸ Bradbury, Malcolm, “The Cities of Modernism,” in Bradbury, Malcolm and McFarlane, James, eds., Modernism, 1890–1930 (New York: Penguin, 1976), 96–104Google Scholar.

⁹ Many of the key studies of modernism focus on urban spaces, including the following examples: Benstock, Shari, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Quinones, Raymond, Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alter, Robert, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Harding, Desmond, Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; Harvey, David, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; and Lehan, Richard, Literary Modernism and Beyond (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ James, N. Gregory charts the social and cultural effects of southern outmigration in The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)Google Scholar. The figures I quote come from his research on US census data, which can be found in Appendix 1 of the book.

¹¹ Creed, Gerald W. and Ching, Barbara make a case for the cultural hierarchy that subordinates rural spaces to urban spaces in “Recognizing Rusticity: Identity and the Power of Place,” in Ching, Barbara and Creed, Gerald W., eds., Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–38Google Scholar. They argue that urbanism has assumed a social primacy that marginalizes ruralism, and their collection extends the case across the twentieth century and around the world. The essays in their collection suggest that the rural versus urban cultural hierarchy coincides with the emergence of modernity.

¹² While I agree with Jolene Hubbs on the concept of rural modernism and its capacity to expand and complicate conceptions of literary modernism, I disagree with her central tenet that ruralism represents obsolescence. Southern ruralism, instead, is a product of modernization, not an absence of modernization. See Jolene Hubbs, “William Faulkner's Rural Modernism,” Mississippi Quarterly, 61, 3 (Summer 2008), 461–75Google Scholar.

¹³ Wallerstein, Immanuel, “What Can One Mean by Southern Culture?”, in Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 200–14Google Scholar.

¹⁴ There is an enormous amount of research on the causes and effects of southern poverty. Three representative sources include Odum, Howard, Southern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936)Google Scholar; Wright, Gavin, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986)Google Scholar; and Aiken, Charles, The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ In American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, Culture, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)Google Scholar, Ted Ownby examines the ways that consumer culture in the South reinforced race and class disparities.

¹⁶ Lutz, Tom in Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Joseph, Phillip in American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006)Google Scholar have both examined the seeming contradictions of regionalist literature in the era of globalization.

¹⁷ Singal, Daniel J., responding to the idea that modernism is primarily an urban movement, holds Faulkner as an example of the rural modernist because he “spent nearly all his life in the countrified confines of Oxford, Mississippi” in William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997),Google Scholar 144. While it is certainly true that Faulkner spent most of his life in Mississippi, I do not think that he was necessarily provincial. The part of his life that he spent outside the South gave him a sufficient base of experience to understand and participate in modernism.

¹⁸ Philip Fisher argues in Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar that cities became the privileged settings for American novels in the late nineteenth century, which aligned rural settings with a corrosive historical past. Storey, Mark counters in Rural Fictions, Urban realities: The Geography of Gilded Age American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar that Gilded Age rural novels critique the progress of urbanization, and he argues that the division between urban and rural texts was unstable. By the twentieth century, as America became a majority urban nation, the distinction between urban and rural became more rigid, and cities became not merely privileged settings but predominant settings.

¹⁹ The full context of this quote can be found in the Report on Economic Conditions of the South from the National Emergency Council (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1938)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Agee, James and Evans, Walker, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988)Google Scholar, 7. All further references in parentheses in the text.

²¹ Godden, Richard and Crawford, Martin, eds., Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars, 1918–1939 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006)Google Scholar, ix.

²² By 1930, America's cities were thoroughly electrified, and 35% of farms in the Northeast had electricity, but only 4% of southern farms had electricity. By 1940, 66% of Northeastern farms had electricity, and the South lagged far behind with only 19% electrified, in spite of the efforts of the Rural Electrification Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. See Kline, Ron, Consumers on the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 287.

²³ Davis, Hugh, The Making of James Agee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 105.

²⁴ Faulkner, William, As I Lay Dying, in William Faulkner: Novels 1930–1935, ed. Blotner, Joseph and Polk, Noel (New York: Library of America, 1985), 1–178.Google Scholar All further references in parentheses.

²⁵ Matthews, John T., “As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age,” boundary 2, 19, 1 (1992), 69–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Gwynn, Frederick and Blotner, Joseph, eds., Faulkner in the University (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1959)Google Scholar, 113.

²⁷ Glasgow, Ellen, “Jordan's End,” in Glasgow, The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (New York: Doubleday & Page, 1923), 47–65Google Scholar.

²⁸ Weinstein, Philip, Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Bleikasten, Andre, The Ink of Melancholy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

²⁹ Moreland, Richard C., Faulkner and Modernism: Rereading and Rewriting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)Google Scholar, 28; and Singal, Daniel J., William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Dorothy J. Hale describes the rhetorical discontinuity as “heterogeneous discourse,” and she argues that it represents the disjuncture between public and private selves in the novel. See Hale, Dorothy J., “As I Lay Dying's Heterogeneous Discourse,” Novel, 23, 1 (Fall 1989), 5–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ In a meditation on description that precedes his textual portrait of Gudger, Agee muses on the aesthetic value of descripton, and in a footnote to the passage he writes, “Cocteau, writing of Picasso and of painting, remarks that the subject is merely the excuse for the painting, and that Picasso does away with the excuse” (239). The embedded reference to Picasso suggests that Agee imagines himself doing the same thing with his redition of Gudger.

³² In Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar, William Stott argues that Agee's book revolutionized documentary writing. He sees Agee as using a technique that emphasizes each subject's individuality through intimate engagement. Agee's book is a work of nonfiction, but many elements of his text apply to narrative in general. Since Agee wrote poetry, fiction, screenplays, and journalism, he had a broad based understanding of generic conventions.

³³ Bergman-Carton, Janis and Carton, Evan, “James Agee, Walker Evans: Tenants in the House of Art,” Raritan, 20, 4 (Spring 2001), 1–19Google Scholar.

³⁴ Huyessen, Andreas, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” New German Critique, 34, 1 (Winter 2007), 188–207Google Scholar.