Considering William Faulkner's representation of the structural paradoxes of labour dependency in the Southern economy, from the antebellum period through to the New Deal, this book seeks to link the occlusive stylistics of Faulkner's writing to a generative social trauma which constitutes its formal core. That trauma, Godden argues, is a labour trauma, centered on the debilitating discovery by the Southern owning class of its own production by those it subordinates. By way of close textual analysis and careful historical contextualization, Richard Godden produces a persuasive account of the ways in which Faulkner's work rests on deeply submerged anxieties about the legacy of violently coercive labour relations in the American South.