Faulkner and the Southern Gothic

Harvard FAS

William Faulkner’s South is a haunted place. In Yoknapatawpha – Faulkner’s imaginary county –we find confederate uniforms rotting inside wardrobes, ruined and faded plantation mansions, dusty ledger books, rotting corpses, unmarked graves and locked rooms. At the same time, Faulkner’s books reverberate with the extensive effects of modernity: the expansion of new technologies into a rural, agrarian landscape; the ecological devastations of modern industry; the impact of the camera, the…