With contributions by Eric J. Sundquist, Craig Werner, Blyden Jackson, Thadious Davis, Pamela J. Rhodes, Walter Taylor, Noel Polk, James A. Snead, Philip M. Weinstein, Lothar Hönnighausen, Frederick R. Karl, Hoke Perkins, Sergei Chakovsky, Michael Grimwood, and Karl F. Zender

The essays in this volume address William Faulkner and the issue of race. Faulkner resolutely has probed the deeply repressed psychological dimensions of race, asking in novel after novel the perplexing question: what does blackness signify in a predominantly white society? However, Faulkner's public statements on the subject of race have sometimes seemed less than fully enlightened, and some of his black characters, especially in the early fiction, seem to conform to white stereotypical notions of what black men and women are like. These essays, originally presented by Faulkner scholars, black and white, male and female, at the 1986 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, the thirteenth in a series of conferences held on the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi, explore the relationship between Faulkner and race.