Following Faulkner: The Critical Response to Yoknapatawpha’s Architect

William Faulkner seems to have sprung a full-blown genius from a remote part of the American South. Yet Faulkner spent much of his life striving to emulate and overshadow - both as a writer and as a person - his great-grandfatherand namesake, Colonel William Falkner, a dueling, railroad-building, soldiering figure who loomed not just as a legend in Faulkner’s family and community but also as a literary forebear, a published novelist, travel writer, and poet. Looking back on his career, Faulkner would mention that early on he had ridden his great-grandfather’s coattails, but by the mid-twentieth century it was clear that it was the great-grandson who was leading the literary world:readers, young writers of fiction, and literary critics were following him as one who had found extraordinary ways to capture and express the most challenging aspects of modern life. Taylor Hagood’s book centers on the concept of following to examine how Faulkner’s work has been analyzed, elucidated, and promoted by a massive body of scholarly work spanning over seven decades. It narrates the development of Faulkner criticism, taking as its premisethe idea that Faulkner forges a fiery path through modernism and into postmodernism that literary critics have been constantly rushing to follow.

Taylor Hagood is Associate Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. His book Faulkner: Writer of Disability (LSU Press, 2014) won the C. Hugh Holman Award for Best Book in Southern Literary Studies in 2015.