Faulkner's Media Romance

Faulkner's Media Romance reappraises William Faulkner's major fiction - from Flags in the Dust through to Absalom, Absalom! - through a media-historical lens. It proposes that Faulkner's long-standing attraction to the paradigms of romance was disciplined and masked by the recurrent use of metaphorical figures borrowed from the new media ecology. Murphet argues that Faulkner dressed up his romance materials in the technological garb of radio, phonography, photography, and cinema, along with the transportation networks of road and air that were being installed in the 1920s. Though this argument, he asserts that Faulkner's modernism emerges from a fraught but productive interplay between his anachronistic predilection for chivalric clichés and his extraordinary knowledge and interest in the most up-to-date media institutions and forms. Rather than see Faulkner as an author divided, one who worked for money in the magazines and studios while producing serious fiction despite their symbolic economies, Murphet demonstrates how profoundly his mature art was shot through with the figures and dynamics of the materials he publicly repudiated . The result is a richer and more nuanced understanding of the dialectics of Faulkner's art. -- from dust jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Romance. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.