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Chapter 2 - Faulkner and Modernist Gothic

from Part I - Approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2022

Sarah Gleeson-White
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
Pardis Dabashi
Affiliation:
Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania
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Summary

In the pantheon of high modernists, William Faulkner is the writer most identified with the gothic. From As I Lay Dying (1930) to Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner brought modernist innovations to gothic modalities, conveying the most grotesque scenes (a nine-day road-trip in July heat to bury Addie Bundren’s putrefying corpse) and relying upon conventional tropes (the haunted plantation house of Sutpen’s Hundred), all conveyed in virtuoso performance. Modernism and the gothic have been regarded so separately, however, by literary historians that scholars had not found affinities between the two until John Paul Riquelme guest-edited a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on the topic in 2000, which was republished in book form as Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (2008).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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