The fifteen essays in this collection explore the resonant intertextual relationship between the fiction of William Faulkner and that of Toni Morrison. Although the two writers are separated by a generation as well as by differences of race, gender, and regional origin, this close critical examination of the creative dialogue between their oeuvres is both timely and appropriate. Toni Morrison's brilliant and powerful novels of the past two decades have accorded her a position in the front ranks of American writers, and like Faulkner before her, she has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. She has publicly acknowledged her artistic indebtedness to Faulkner on a number of occasions. But Morrison also resists the Faulknerian heritage in profound ways. This resistance is certainly, in part at least, the natural reluctance of any highly original artist to be regarded as the product of her predecessor's influence. This push-pull of Morrison's acceptance of and resistance to the Faulknerian heritage provides a major source for the critical energy exhibited in this collection. Each contributor, whether addressing broad, general issues in both writers or whether detailing similarities and differences in particular works, finds that the authors illuminate each other. No reader of Faulkner will ever read him in the same way after encountering Morrison. Carol A. Kolmerten is a professor of English at Hood College. Stephen M. Ross is director of the Office of Challenge Grants, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the coauthor of Reading Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury. Judith Bryant Wittenberg is a professor and chair of the English department at Simmons College.

Ross uses theoretically grounded notions of voice to propose new ways of explaining how Faulkner's novels and stories express meaning, showing how Faulkner used the affective power of voice to induce the reader to forget the silent and originless nature of written fiction. Ross departs from previous Faulkner criticism by proceeding not text-by-text or chronologically but by constructing a workable taxonomy, that defines the types of voice in Faulkner's fiction: phenomenal voice, a depicted event or object within the represented fictional world: mimetic voice, the illusion that a person is speaking psychic voice, one heard only in the mind and overheard only through fiction's omniscience: and oratorical voice, and overtly intertextual voice that derives from a discursive practice - Southern oratory - recognizable outside the boundaries of any Faulkner text and identifiable as part of Faulkner's biographical and regional heritage.