Faulkner and Slavery

In 1930, the same year he moved into a slave-built antebellum mansion in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner published his first work of fiction that gave serious attention to the experience and perspective of an enslaved individual. For the next two decades, he repeatedly returned to the theme of slavery and the figures of the enslaved while probing the racial, economic, and political contours of his region, nation, and hemisphere, in fictions including a number of his most important novels: The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. Slavery’s multifold legacies profoundly shaped Faulkner’s fictions themselves, the world he wrote about, and the world in which he wrote, as detailed in the thirteen essays collected here. Contributors examine the constitutive links among slavery, capitalism, and modernity across Faulkner’s oeuvre; how the history of slavery at the University of Mississippi informs writings like Absalom, Absalom!; trace how slavery’s topologies of the rectilinear grid or square run up against the more reparative geography of the oval in Faulkner’s narratives; explore how slave histories literally sound and resound across centuries of history, and across multiple novels and stories, in Faulkner’s fictional county of Yoknapatawpha; and reveal how the author’s remodeling work on his own residence brought him into an awkward engagement with the spatial and architectural legacies of chattel slavery in north Mississippi. Faulkner and Slavery offers a timely intervention not only in the critical study of the writer’s work but in ongoing national and global conversations about the afterlives of slavery and the necessary work of antiracism.