Faulkner’s Modernisms

Jay Watson, James G. Thomas Jr.

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496864581
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Literature

Contributions by Benjamin S. Child, Leigh Anne Duck, John N. Duvall, Amy A. Foley, Susan Stanford Friedman, Michael Gleason, Jolene Hubbs, Anne MacMaster, Sean McCann, Maggie E. Morris Davis, Julian Murphet, Ben Robbins, Benoît Tadié, Jay Watson, and Michael Zeitlin

Few would dispute today that William Faulkner belongs among the front ranks of literary modernists, though he was not typically viewed in those terms when publishing his major works. But what sort of modernist—or modernists—was he? This collection examines the who, what, where, when, and how of Faulkner's modernism: its characters and cohort, its key subjects and themes, its locations and periodization, and its defining aesthetic strategies.

The essays place Faulkner in dialogue with global modernists such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Richard Wright. Contributors explore his fascination with modern objects and architecture; his experiments in aviation and adaptation to avant-garde theater; the impact of modernity on childhood, family, and nation; his critique of eugenics, Fordism, and Taylorism; his phenomenology of race; and his movement from "high" to "late" modernism. They also question the very utility of the term "modernism" when applied to Faulkner's singular art. Faulkner's Modernisms offers a bracing reappraisal of one of the twentieth century's most challenging and idiosyncratic writers.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note on the Conference
• Introduction
• Family, Nation, Sin: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! in Conversation with Albert Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree and Elif Shafak’s Bastard of Istanbul
• Pillars of Modernism: Stasis and Flux in Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce
• Vardaman’s Capacity: The Modernist Language of the Child in Poverty in As I Lay Dying
• Faulkner’s Anti-Eugenic Modernism
• “Around a Mother”: William Faulkner, Antonin Artaud, and Jean-Louis Barrault
• Unsettling Experiences: Modernism, Phenomenology, and Racial Segregation
• “A Countryside Which Would Have Repudiated the Term Constituency”: The Hamlet, Modernist Pastoral, and the New Deal
• The Ends of the Cosmopolitan: Go Down, Moses, Rurality, and Faulkner’s Americanity
• Faulkner’s Cool Choreographies: Rural Taylorism and the Economy of Bodily Motion
• Corporate Hands upon “Hand Upon the Waters”: Faulkner’s Short Fiction and The Saturday Evening Post
• Mechanical and Human Factors in Faulkner Aviation and the Crash of the Italian Airliner, 1954
• “Jest Another Snopes”: The Mansion and Late-Modernist Aesthetics
• Faulkner: A Reluctant Modernism
• About the Contributors
• Index