Doreen Fowler's Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed is only the second book-length pychoanalytic interpretation of Faulkner's oeuvre and the first to be predicated on Lacanian theory as modified by Kristeva and Chodorow. Fowler exposes psychic conflicts that drive Faulkner's fiction and posits from them an underlying tension between the desire for difference and wholeness, between the mother and the father, between the living body and death.

"This book is a sound and important contribution to Faulkner studies. Fowler's reading of the ways that Faulkner's major novels reflect the tensions of striving for both absence and presence, wholeness and autonomy, is deftly and persuasively portrayed. She displays impressive knowledge of Lacan, Lacanian analysis, and previous Faulkner scholarship". -- Deborah Clarke, Pennsylvania State University

There have been surprisingly few book-length psychoanalytic treatments of Faulkner's work and until now none that have employed the poststructuralist theory of Lacan, Kristeva, and Chodorow. In Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed. Doreen Fowler uses what she terms a feminist psychoanalytic methodology to assess the symbolic meanings of race and gender in five of his major novels: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. Focusing on black and female characters, she demonstrates how these figures represent psychic doubles for Faulkner's white male protagonists.

Fowler's reading identifies in these five texts a connection between cultural and psychic repression. She argues that this repression of the feminine and the racial other is motivated by the desire to shore up an ever-precarious ego identity that alternately desires and expels these "others". She in fact finds similarities between the writings of Faulkner and Lacan -- affinities not of approach or method, but of preoccupation. Her feminist reading attempts to reclaim what is often marginalized by Lacanian theorists: the important role of the mother, who is the first to become "other". She exposes the psychic conflicts that characterize Faulkner's fiction and posits from them anunderlying tension between desires for difference and wholeness, for the father and the mother, and for subjectivity and death.

Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed addresses the deep ambivalence toward women and blacks in Faulkner's fiction and offers a much-needed response to frequent allegations that Faulkner embraced white male supremacist values by demonstrating how his texts expose and critique patriarchal culture.

Readers know that humor abounds in the writings of William Faulkner, but the thousands of articles and hundreds of books about his fiction contain little commentary on Faulknerian humor. To give attention to this subject crying out for schlarly treatment, numerous aspects of Faulknerian humor were explored at the Eleventh Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference held in 1984 at the University of Mississippi.

Thirteen papers presented at that conference are collected in this volume. Deploring the scholar's tendency to emphasize only Faulkner's serious themes and to neglect the humor that is a natural part of his world, the editors have collected papers showing that humor is not a separate, subordinate part of Faulkner but is indeed at the heart of his writing. The various essays find natural humor even in "The Sound and the Fury" and "Light in August," novels which are traditionally viewed only as tragedies. The elements of Southerwestern humor, folk humor, black humor, and classical comedy emerge from Faulkner's books and give them much of their vigor.

Thus "Faulkner and Humor" offers fresh vision for Faulkner's legions of readers who have seen his fiction as arising only from a dark and forbidding world.

In an original contribution to the psychoanalytic approach to literature, Doreen Fowler focuses on the fiction of four major American writers--William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison--to examine the father's function as a "border figure." Although the father has most commonly been interpreted as the figure who introduces opposition and exclusion to the child, Fowler finds in these literary depictions fathers who instead support the construction of a social identity by mediating between cultural oppositions.

Fowler counters the widely accepted notion that boundaries are solely sites of exclusion and offers a new theoretical model of boundary construction. She argues that boundaries are mysterious, dangerous, in-between places where a balance of sameness and difference makes differentiation possible. In the fiction of these southern writers, father figures introduce a separate cultural identity by modeling this mix of relatedness and difference. Fathers intervene in the mother-child relationship, but the father is also closely related to both mother and child. This model of boundary formation as a balance of exclusion and relatedness suggests a way to join with others in an inclusive, multicultural community and still retain ethnic, racial, and gender differences.

Fowler's model for the father's mediating role in initiating gender, race, and other social differences shows not only how psychoanalytic theory can be used to interpret fiction and cultural history but also how literature and history can reshape theory.

Reflecting developments in Faulkner criticism, these papers delivered at the 1980 Faulkner and Yoknapatawtha Conference point the way to a new and relatively unexplored avenue of research--the study of relationships among Faulkner's seemingly distinct novels.

No longer satisfied to look only at the individual work, critics are instead surveying the whole field of Faulkner's fiction. Many of the lectures collected in this volume direct attention to the full scope and range of Faulkner's fictional world, searching for, and finding, unity, harmony, and interrelationships. Some of the essays, like Ellen Douglas's "Faulkner in Time" and James Carothers's "The Road to The Reivers," examine all of Faulkner's novels, seeking to uncover an overall design and meaning. Others trace the appearances, in work after work, of one theme or figure. Among the subjects considered in this way are Faulkner's women, his black characters, his heroes, his aristocrats, and his attitude toward death.

Taken together, these essays implicitly acknowledge the appropriateness of metaphor of a cosmos for Faulkner's fictional creation. To be fully and accurately understood, each single part of Faulkner's vast system of fictional meanings, like the separate worlds in a cosmos, must be assessed in the context of the whole.

It began in the 1930s in a powerful and elegant literature arising from a seemingly improbable place, the rural, agrarian South. This literary flowering, a proliferation of Southern letters, is called the Southern Renaissance.

Although the definitive history of the Southern literary renaissance has yet to be written, its leading figure, without question, was William Faulkner.

Helping to define and describe this startling literary phenomenon and Faulkner's place in it are papers of eight noted scholars included in this collection. Brooks, Rubin, King, Minter, Watkins, Samway, Blackburn, and Spencer, one of the authors whose fiction is identified with the movement, focus their papers upon the philosophical and critical aspects of the Southern Renaissance.

The international reputation and pervasive influence of William Faulkner upon world literature is the subject of the papers In this book. At the Ninth Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in August 1982 at the University of Mississippi, scholars from throughout the world convened to express their admiration for the writings of the Nobel Laureate. For this collection the papers of scholars from Chile, Italy, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Japan, Germany and the United States are assembled from this international forum to assess Faulkner and his works and to answer questions about the extent of his influence. Is Faulkner read overseas? Is he popular? Is Faulkner's ""postage stamp of native soil"" nevertheless universally accessible? As the editors of this collection conclude, ""the name of William Faulkner has become in a household word in far-distant countries."" They find in the responses from scholars representing the nine countries included at the conference that 'everywhere Faulkner was a known quantity; everywhere he was read and admired. Ultimately...Faulkner speaks to the hearts of the people of the world."" Included is a bibliographical appendix listing translations and recent foreign criticism of Faulkner's works.

These ten essays from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1989 at the University of Mississippi, explore the religious themes in William Faulkner's fiction. The papers published here conclude that the key to religious meaning in Faulkner may be that his texts focus not so much on God but on a human aspiration of the divine.

The works of William Faulkner are charged with elements of such great diversity that they are an almost inexhaustible resource for study and analysis. One of the most diverse is the subject of this fascinating volume.

However alien Faulkner professed popular culture to be to his conception of art and taste, his works are imbued with its inescapable influence. The relationship between Faulkner, a novelist not known for public accessibility, and the culture of the masses makes this an exceptional volume indeed. That the author of dense, riddling novels like "The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom " and other works associated with high modernist art could also appeal to the popular tastes and be influenced by popular culture is a phenomenon made evident in this collection of essays.

Faulkner's works reveal that he was drawn to popular culture repeatedly and that this "lowbrow art" provided material for his works and for his livelihood. His attempt to write a novel with wide appeal is represented in "Sanctuary." His numerous associations with Hollywood and scriptwriting and his publishing stories in popular magazines like the "Saturday Evening Post" pushed Faulkner to modify his literary modernism to the demands of a wider audience.

In 1944, William Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley, "I'm telling the same story over and over which is myself and the world. That's all a writer ever does, he tells his own biography in a thousand different terms."

With these words, Faulkner suggests that what changes in the course of his prolific novel-writing career is not so much the content but the style, "the thousand different terms" of his fiction. The essays in "Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction," first presented at the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi, focus on Faulkner's narrative inventiveness, on how Faulkner, like his character Benjy in "The Sound and the Fury," relentlessly kept "trying to say."

The contributors, authorities on Faulkner's narrative, offer a wide variety of critical approaches to Faulkner's fiction-writing process. Cleanth Brooks, for example, applies the strategies of New Criticism to Faulkner's rendering of the heroic and pastoral modes; Judith L. Sensibar attempts to locate biographical sources for repeated Faulknerian paradigms; and Philip M. Weinstein draws on the theories of the Marxist Althusser and the French psychoanalyst Lacan. The topics examined are similarly wide-ranging.

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. With essays byEric J. SundquistCraig WernerBlyden JacksonThadious DavisPamela J. RhodesWalter TaylorNoel PolkJames A. SneadPhilip M. WeinsteinLothar HoumlnnighausenFrederick R. KarlHoke PerkinsSergei ChakovskyMichael GrimwoodKarl F. Zender

In these stimulating papers from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in 1985, feminism and Faulkner studies collide, with beneficial results for each.

The disruptive and disturbing characterization of women in Faulkner's fictional world and the influence of actual women in the novelist's life are given attentive study in these papers. The contributors to this collection consider questions debated for many decades in Faulkner studies and those recently raised to prominence under the illuminating ray of feminist criticism.

"There is throughout Faulkner something disturbing," Noel Polk observes, "about the comprehensiveness with which women in his work are associated with blood and excrement and filth and death."