William Faulkner: At the Intersection of Styles and Poetics

Abstract

The article contextualizes William Faulkner’s fi ction in reference to the major twentieth-century tendencies in literary interpretation. Faulkner’s work is characterized by the presence of a series of inherent contradictions: between form and content, puritanism and Nietzschean nihilism, literary achievement and public recognition. This accounts for a variety of interpretative possibilities: Faulkner’s fi ction can be read in different generic contexts, e.g. the Victorian convention of the novel, modernism and postmodernism, as well as through the lenses of a spectrum of theories, including post-colonial studies and Marxism.