This introductory chapter lays the groundwork for the substantive analyses to follow. It foregrounds Faulkner’s profound continuing attachment to romance tropes which his more modernist aesthetic sensibilities would increasingly deem invalid. It argues that Faulkner’s primary artistic challenge was finding ways and means to “manage” his anachronistic romanticism, via technical strategies of omission, repression, and tropological masking. The chapter both considers the lingering aesthetic ideology of romance in the modern United States, especially the South, and outlines a genealogy of literary tactics Faulkner was able to employ in order to discipline it, before introducing the major new formal device for which he was responsible: masking romance with figures taken from the new media system.
