Faulkner, Welty, and Wright: A Mississippi Confluence ed. by Annette Trefzer, Jay Watson, and James G. Thomas, Jr. (review)

are three famous twentieth-century writers from Mississippi.This simple statement immediately raises questions about how well they knew each other, whether they read each other's works, and how they represented life in Mississippi, the South, and the United States during segregation.The 2021 iteration of the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference examined these issues, and it also considered how more recent writers from Mississippi have engaged with the legacy of this earlier generation.The conference took place online during the Covid pandemic, with critics sharing their papers over Zoom, and the essays are collected in a new edition from University Press of Mississippi that explores the relationships among the three writers and their works.While the writers have invited numerous comparisons in literary criticism, they have never been submitted to an extended level of comparison, which, in and of itself, raises some concerns about the lingering segregation of literary criticism.The collection's editors-Annette Trefzer, Jay Watson, and James G. Thomas, Jr.-borrow the term "confluence" from Welty to describe the overarching approach of the essays.Comparative analysis reveals how differences in perspective and experience affect the authors' depictions of time and place, but the confluent approach that the editors describe offers an even more nuanced examination of how social structures are represented in the texts."A methodology based on confluences requires flexible, indeed fluid, modes of comparative judgment and seems especially fitting for the study of a trio of writers who hailed from a state whose geography, economy, and culture were profoundly shaped by the continent's mightiest river," the editors state."Acknowledging that