Identity and Convention in Faulkner’s Light in August and Morrison’s Jazz

Abstract

Previous chapters suggested that the natural sciences’ domination of the modern university motivated the revaluation of Frankenstein and the emergence and influence of black studies explain the contrary versions of Native Son. In a similar way, this chapter suggests that the evolution of black feminism explains the revaluation and reinterpretation of William Faulkner’s and Toni Morrison’s fiction. In the 1940s, when the New Critics first established the canonical status of William Faulkner’s work, they appreciated his pessimism, which reveals what John Crowe Ransom called the “moral confusion” of the “modern world”—it can “look back nostalgically upon the old world of traditional values and feel loss and perhaps despair” (112). In the 1990s, when the success of Toni Morrison had generated important new studies of her work and Faulkner’s, scholars suggested that, as Carol A. Kolmerton says, “Read together, the fiction of Faulkner and Morrison offers a richly varied and profoundly moving meditation on racial, cultural, and gender issues in twentieth-century America.”