Popular Faulkner: The Development of “The National Voice” Across The Bayard and Ringo Stories

Abstract

This thesis seeks to demonstrate the development of a 'popular' Faulkner that emerges through the composition history of his 1938 novel 'The Unvanquished.' Using Michael Warner's concept of "publics," Faulkner's Bayard-Ringo stories, in their writing and rewriting for George Horace Lorimer and 'The Saturday Evening Post,' can be read as the first Yoknapatawpha county stories to demonstrate a heightened contemporary political relevancy by allegorizing and criticizing Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Examining the steps taken to transform the magazine stories into a much longer, proper novel, we can see 'The Unvanquished' not as a derivative work hastily composed for profit, but a key bridge between the insular high-modernist novels of Faulkner's early career and the more politically direct novels that appear after the Second World War.