Winner of the 2020 C. Hugh Holman Award
William Faulkner has enjoyed a secure reputation as American modernism's foremost fiction writer, and as a landmark figure in international literary modernism, for well over half a century. Less secure, however, has been any scholarly consensus about what those modernist credentials actually entail. Over recent decades, there have been lively debates in modernist studies over the who, what, where, when, and how of the surprisingly elusive phenomena of modernism and modernity. This book broadens and deepens an understanding of Faulkner's oeuvre by following some of the guiding questions and insights of new modernism studies scholarship into understudied aspects of Faulkner's literary modernism and his cultural modernity.
William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity explores Faulkner's rural Mississippians as modernizing subjects in their own right rather than mere objects of modernization; traces the new speed gradients, media formations, and intensifications of sensory and affective experience that the twentieth century brought to the cities and countryside of the US South; maps the fault lines in whiteness as a racial modernity under construction and contestation during the Jim Crow period; resituates Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County within the transnational counter-modernities of the Black Atlantic; and follows the author's imaginative engagement with modern biopolitics through his late work A Fable, a novel Faulkner hoped to make his 'magnum o.' By returning to the utterly uncontroversial fact of Faulkner's modernism with a critical sensibility sharpened by new modernism studies, William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity aims to spark further reappraisal of a distinguished and quite
dazzling body of fiction. Perhaps even make it new.
Industry Reviews
a stunning accomplishment * Peter Lurie, Study the South *
An exciting and well-considered study, the book is exceedingly well written and structured. This is the rare scholarly monograph that would be an excellent textbook for seminars on American modernism and Faulkner seminars. Watson succeeds in making the literary giant of modernism 'new'. Highly recommended. * Michelle E. Moore, Modern Language Review *
a groundbreaking work of new materialist and radical historicist interpretation that places Faulkner's work at the heart of early twentieth-century modernization in the South. * Joseph Kuhn, European Journal of American Studies *
William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity is a major achievement, demonstrating Watson's wide reading in new modernist studies and a specialist's depth in the fiction by and the criticism on William Faulkner. The study is consistently innovative and, in the case of chapter 6, startlingly timely. * John N. Duvall, American Literary History *
William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity is an ambitious book that covers the whole Faulknerian oeuvre through a succession of perspectives that, in turn, display a remarkable modernity in the thoroughly refreshing way they combine literature and history, fiction and facts, words and statistics, text and image. It is also a tremendously rich and generous book, which reveals its author's extensive culture in an exceptional variety of fields. * Frederique Spill, Cercles *
