With contributions by Eric J. Sundquist, Craig Werner, Blyden Jackson,
Thadious Davis, Pamela J. Rhodes, Walter Taylor, Noel Polk, James A.
Snead, Philip M. Weinstein, Lothar Hönnighausen, Frederick R. Karl, Hoke
Perkins, Sergei Chakovsky, Michael Grimwood, and Karl F. Zender
The essays in this volume address William Faulkner and the issue of
race. Faulkner resolutely has probed the deeply repressed psychological
dimensions of race, asking in novel after novel the perplexing question:
what does blackness signify in a predominantly white society? However,
Faulkner's public statements on the subject of race have sometimes
seemed less than fully enlightened, and some of his black characters,
especially in the early fiction, seem to conform to white stereotypical
notions of what black men and women are like. These essays, originally
presented by Faulkner scholars, black and white, male and female, at the
1986 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, the thirteenth in a series
of conferences held on the Oxford campus of the University of
Mississippi, explore the relationship between Faulkner and race.