Astonishing Byblows: Rurality, Snopesism, and Populist Modernization in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend

Abstract

David Evans summarizes a common critical response to Faulkner's The Hamlet, describing the novel as "an allegory of modernization and its social and cultural consequences." This essay claims that Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend fictions—The Hamlet, Father Abraham, and "Barn Burning"—assert a largely unremarked source for modernization: the rural countryside. By tracing the modernizing energies of turn-of-the-century rural populism and its politics of rage, as well as the economic and cultural abstractions of rural capital, on display in these texts, this essay argues that they reverse a familiar trajectory in which modernity fans outland from distinctly urban environs.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.