Faulkner and His Critics (review)

William Faulkner famously claimed, “I think of myself as a farmer, not a writer,” yet his stories and novels have spawned a sprawling critical enterprise that continues to examine all aspects of his life and works.¹ In Faulkner and His Critics, John Duvall, longtime editor of Modern Fiction Studies and author of books on Faulkner, Morrison, and race in the South, offers a new collection of nineteen essays, originally published in MFS between 1956 and 2009. Together, they consider “all of Faulkner’s major fiction from 1929 to 1942” and provide “a pretty clear picture of the paradigm shifts in the profession since the mid-1950s” (ix). There is no dearth of collections on William Faulkner’s oeuvre; the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference—the 38^th gathering convened in Oxford, Mississippi, in July 2011—has made publishing essay collections on all aspects of Faulkner’s work practically a cottage industry, with 30 volumes to date. Duvall himself co-edited Faulkner and Postmodernism from the 1999 conference. Other volumes of conference proceedings have been published, along with essay collections on specific works and on thematic, historical, and formal aspects of Faulkner’s work.

In a seemingly saturated market, Duvall’s new volume offers a significant distinction: a historical perspective on Faulkner criticism through the lens of one of the key journals associated with the study of American modernism. As Duvall points out in his short preface, from its inception in 1955 until the launch of the Faulkner Journal (1985) and the advent of an annual issue on Faulkner at Mississippi Quarterly (1964–99), MFS was the primary outlet for academic essays on Faulkner’s fiction. Duvall has selected representative essays from major scholars in Faulkner studies—James G. Watson, Donald Kartiganer, Doreen Fowler, and Cheryl Lester—along with work from scholars new to the field. Because Duvall includes a complete bibliography of the articles on Faulkner published in MFS, readers are quickly able to place the works Duvall has selected into the larger context of Faulkner essays published by the journal. Indeed, the bibliography is an essential part of the volume, and readers will be very grateful for it.

Duvall claims to eschew an organization that “tell[s] a familiar story of the changing critical reading practices over the last six decades” (x), but a brief survey of the table of contents—essays are organized chronologically within four thematic categories—nevertheless points to shifts in critical reading practices. More specifically, the volume demonstrates how changing reading practices have shaped Faulkner studies over the last half century. For example, Duvall has selected three essays for the “Myth and Religion” section, all from the 1950s and 1960s. These essays all depend on New Critical reading practices and show the influence of the “myth and symbol” school of American studies. The next two sections, on “Temporality, History, and Trauma” and “Gender and Race: Affect, the Body, and Identity,” contain the lion’s share of the essays (twelve out of the nineteen) and are concentrated in the period after 1980 (eight of the twelve). Together, these essays illustrate the move towards historicist, theoretical, and post-structuralist approaches to Faulkner’s work, as in Rebecca Saunders’s essay on Absalom, Absalom! (1996), Keith Louise Fulton’s essay on the Snopes trilogy (1988), and Erin E. Edwards’s essay on As I Lay Dying (2009). The final section, “Modernity and Modernist Technique,” which includes four essays—two from the 1950s and two from the 1980s—perhaps encapsulates best the historical change the volume illuminates. This section demonstrates the kinds of evidence critics have located in Faulkner’s novels as their ideas about Faulkner’s “modernism” and his relationship to “modernity” have evolved. At the end of the volume, Duvall has helpfully included an appendix with an alternate grouping of essays by novel to allow readers interested in specific novels to identify the relevant essays quickly.

Duvall’s selections and the organization of the volume also emphasize some of the surprising...