Faulkner's Families

Contributions by Josephine Adams, Jeff Allred, Garry Bertholf, Maxwell Cassity, John N. Duvall, Katherine Henninger, Maude Hines, Robert Jackson, Julie Beth Napolin, Rebecca Nisetich, George Porter Thomas, Jay Watson, and Yuko Yamamoto If it seems outrageous to suggest that one of the twentieth centurys most important literary cartographers of the private recesses of consciousness is also among its great novelists of family, William Faulkner nonetheless fits the bill on both counts. Family played an outsized role in both his life and his writings, often in deeply problematic ways, surfacing across his oeuvre in a dazzling range of distorted, defamiliarized, and transgressive forms, while on other occasions serving as a crucible for crushing forces of conformity, convention, and tradition. The dozen essays featured in this collection approach Faulkners many familiesactual and imaginedas especially revealing windows to his work and his world. In Faulkner's Families, contributors explore the role of the child in Faulkners vision of family and regional society; sibling relations throughout the author's body of work; the extension of family networks beyond blood lineage and across racial lines; the undutiful daughters of Yoknapatawpha County; the critical power of family estrangement and subversive genealogies in Faulkners imagination; forms of queer and interspecies kinship; the epidemiological imagination of Faulkners notorious Snopes family as social contagion; the experiences of the African American families who worked on the writers Greenfield Farm property; and Faulkners role in promoting a Cold Warera ideology of "the family of man" in postWorld War II Japan.