This chapter provides a close reading of Faulkner’s first depiction of the plantation manor and argues that it provides the prototype for a spatial pattern that will be repeated so often and in so many variable forms as to constitute the foundational archetype of networked space and information flow throughout the whole of the Yoknapatawpha fiction. In Flags in the Dust, Faulkner visualizes a vertically-oriented spatial symbolism in which a violent ideology is embedded in the artifacts and aesthetic objects of the Sartoris planter network so that this ideology is capable of replicating its content in individuals who inhabit this space. This predicament is most fully realized in Colonel Sartoris’s statue, for while the man himself is dead, the ideological information of his mimetic print circulates through the financial and technological infrastructure of bank and rail, using the innovations of modernity to disseminate itself even while reinforcing the racial and class suppositions of the slave system that preceded it.

Following Carol S. Manning’s argument that “the real beginning” of the Southern Renaissance anticipates by a generation or more the standard dating of the phenomenon to the post-World War I decade, this chapter links the achievements of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century women writers who were instrumental in guiding the region’s literature and art into intellectual modernity, to a distinguished interwar cohort of women authors who inherited and extended their predecessors’ critique of the American South. It situates figures like Kate Chopin, Pauline Hopkins, Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells, Mary Noialles Murfree, Anna Julia Cooper, Helen Keller, and Ellen Glasgow as inaugurators of a “long Renascence” that reaches from the 1880s to the 1950s to include now-canonical authors like Katherine Anne Porter, Nella Larsen, Caroline Gordon, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Lillian Smith, alongside lesser-studied writers like Julia Peterkin, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Evelyn Scott, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Frances Newman, Grace Lumpkin, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.