Faulkner's Media Romance
This book reassesses William Faulkner’s engagement with modern media technologies and transportation systems. It argues that Faulkner’s inveterate interest in figures of flight, automobiles, radio, phonographs, photographs, and other modern techno-media was secretly motivated by a profound and ongoing aesthetic tug of war in his writing. He resolved this tension between artistic modernism and the vanished worlds of antebellum romance by a recourse to tropes borrowed from the modern media system. These tropes masked his investment in romance materials, giving it a modern overlay, and allowed him to look critically upon the persistence of superannuated romance within the modern media ecology itself. This economical and generative strategy allowed Faulkner to “eat his cake and have it” as regards those romance materials and to make entirely novel moves in the rapidly changing form of the novel between 1929 and 1936.