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Call for Articles: Special Issue on William Faulkner

JSSE 90 (Spring 2028)
Deadline for abstract submissions: 30 October 2026

Presentation

  • 1 “I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then trie (...)

In 2023, the Library of America published a collection of Faulkner’s short stories, the sixth volume of its edition of William Faulkner’s works, which shows a keen and never-ending interest in a part of his work which was perceived by academics in varying ways. In 2017, the prestigious French collection La Pléiade published a 1824-page-long volume containing all of Faulkner’s short stories, including collected, uncollected, posthumous and original versions of stories reworked and incorporated in The Town and The Mansion, in translations revisited by François Pitavy. Faulkner himself admitted: “I never wrote a short story I liked” (Lion in the Garden 59). In 1932, while writing Light in August, he asked for an advance from his publisher and—echoing an earlier comment by F. Scott Fitzgerald—compared the writing of short fiction to prostitution: “it’s either this, or put the novel aside and go whoring again with short stories” (Blotner 299). Concerns about money, profitability and economic imperatives pervade the texts of some short stories which, like scriptwriting, were initially considered and “experienced” as potboilers: for example, John T. Matthews construes “Red Leaves” as “a reflection on modern American society’s enslavement to the principle of acquisition” (19). Robert Sayre similarly underlines that Faulkner as a short story writer cannot refrain from recycling such materialistic subjects into the fabric of his short fiction: “The economic system and the mentality based on the primacy of exchange value, as well as their consequences in human terms, not only recur as partial thematic strands in many of the stories, but are also central in a number of them” (“Romanticism” 68). Yet, despite the mercantile dimension, Faulkner expressed his admiration and respect for the genre, “the most demanding form after poetry” (Hoffmann and Vickery 68)1:

In a short story that’s next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost right. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That’s why I rate that second [to poetry]—it’s because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There is less room in it for trash… It’s got to be absolutely impeccable, absolutely perfect. (Faulkner in the University 207)

Jay Watson shows that Faulkner was clearly influenced by Poe, who situated short fiction between poetry and the novel in the hierarchy of genres. Moreover, “Poe’s stress on the economy, unity and purity of the short story clearly left its mark on his [Faulkner’s] understanding of the genre” (7): the short story, the aesthetic principles of which Faulkner somehow extolled, was a crossroads between poetry and novel-writing, a transitional or liminal place in which he experimented with plots and generic frames. According to Susan Hunter Brown commenting on “A Rose for Emily,” “[t]he short story thus becomes Faulkner’s exploration of the limitations of the form” (326). His collections of stories, some of which were also regarded as short story cycles (see Donaldson), actually blurred boundaries between different genres such as the tall tale, the novella or the novel itself, and throughout his career as a short story writer, Faulkner also tried out different sub-genres of short stories, including local color stories, ghost stories, detective stories, and hunting stories. The subjects of his short fiction range from Native Americans and pioneer America to the two World Wars, and a world “beyond” Yoknapatawpha, the famous cosmos he had created, be it “real”—“Golden Land” or “Pennsylvania Station”—or imaginary—“Carcassonne” or “Beyond.” Paradoxically, the narrow space of short stories sometimes gave him a wide scope and the opportunity to explore uncharted territories outside the South. As mentioned by Theresa M. Towner in an interview with the Library of America in February 2024, “[t]his career-long involvement with story collections shows us that Faulkner was always trying to find ways to ‘make it new,’ as Ezra Pound said art should do, even when the new work of art had its own past.”

The quest for renewal was all the more challenging since Faulkner as a novelist is famous for his labyrinthine sentences, his repetitions and digressions, his narrative resting on tensions between fragmentation, proliferation and expansion, his desperate attempts at “trying to say” contrasting with his aesthetic ideal of the “perfect,” “impeccable” short story requiring accuracy and exactitude. Some short stories such as “A Rose for Emily,” “Dry September” or “That Evening Sun”—the very stories Michel Gresset chose to include in a bilingual Folio edition in France—are now regarded as classics and may be celebrated as “modèles du genre” (perfect models of the genre), but Faulkner’s opus as a writer of shorter forms extends far beyond these “most splendid” achievements. As such, Faulkner’s short stories cannot be considered only as “chips from the novelist’s bench” (Skei, Short Story Career 287) and can be read as independent, self-contained works.

Suggested Proposals

The purpose of this special issue of JSSE is thus to examine the challenges faced by Faulkner as a short story writer, especially—but not exclusively:

  • the status of the short story in Faulkner’s work and its reception

  • economic imperatives and consumerism

  • experimentation and short fiction as “a creative writing workshop”

  • Faulkner’s play with the traditional forms, conventions and contents of the genre: narrative technique, stylistic devices and strategies, punctuation and typography

  • Faulkner’s phenomenological writing, his writing of sensation

  • ellipsis and the unspeakable; condensation and proliferation

  • Faulkner’s use of different chronotopes and his handling of chronology

  • meta/short fiction and the mise en abyme of short story writing

  • the Southern Gothic

  • orality, cock-and-bull stories and tall tales, short fiction and humor, Frontier humor

  • the ecopoetic dimension in wilderness short stories

  • initiation in the short story and for the short story teller

  • childhood and children as story-tellers and/or characters

  • margins in the short story: the community and the individual; race and gender relations for example

  • queer Faulkner

On account of elusive generic borders and interwoven thematic patterns within Faulkner’s work taken as a whole, defining which body of short fiction should be studied is itself a challenge. Malcolm Cowley’s publication of The Portable Faulkner (1946) compelled him to select short stories and to organize them around heterogeneous or contrapuntal lines such as “The Last Wilderness,” “Modern Times” or “The Undying Past,” among others: he highlights the intricacies of the links between short stories and novels, a short story being sometimes “a sequel to an earlier novel,” or a novel containing “the sequel to a story” (xiii). Academics have largely tried to disentangle these different threads. Priority should thus be given to volumes such as New Orleans Sketches, the Uncollected Stories, the Collected Stories or the aforementioned volume published in 2023 by The Library of America, which includes Knight’s Gambit, Collected Stories, Big Woods and “Other Works.”

Indicative Bibliography

Carothers, James B. William Faulkner’s Short Stories. UMI Research Press, 1985. Print.

Donaldson, Susan V. “Contending Narratives: Go Down, Moses and the Short Story Cycle.” Faulkner and the Short Story: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1990. Eds. Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1992. 128-48. Print.

Faulkner, William. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. 1950. New York: Vintage International, 1995. Print.

Faulkner, William. Faulkner in the University. Eds. Frederick Gwynn and Joseph Blotner. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1959. Print.

Faulkner, William. Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962. Eds. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1968. Print.

Faulkner, William. New Orleans Sketches. 1958. Ed. Carvel Collins. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2010. Print.

Faulkner, William. The Portable Faulkner. 1946. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Faulkner, William. Stories: Knight’s Gambit, Collected Stories, Big Woods, Other Work. Ed. Theresa M. Towner. New York: The Library of America, 2023. Print.

Faulkner, William. Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner. Ed. Joseph Blotner. New York: Vintage, 1981. Print.

Ferguson, James. Faulkner’s Short Fiction. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991. Print.

Gresset, Michel. “‘Une rose pour Emily’, ‘Soleil couchant’, ‘Septembre ardent’/‘A Rose for Emily,’ ‘That Evening Sun,’ ‘Dry September.’” Trans. Maurice Edgar Coindreau. Revised translation, preface and notes by Michel Gresset. Paris: Gallimard, “Folio,” 1996. Print.

Harrington, Evans and Ann J. Abadie, eds. Faulkner and the Short Story: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1990. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1992. Print.

Hoffmann Frederick J., and Olga W. Vickery, eds. William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1960. Print.

Hunter-Brown, Susan. “‘A Rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Eds. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989. 317-27. Print.

Jones, Diane Brown. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of William Faulkner. New York and Toronto: G.K. Hall & Co., 1994. Print.

Matthews, John T. “Shortened Stories: Faulkner and the Market.” Faulkner and the Short Story: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1990. Eds. Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1992. 3-37. Print.

Meriwether, James B. “The Short Fiction of William Faulkner: A Bibliography.” The Yearbook of American Bibliographical and Textual Studies I (1971): 293-329. Print.

Polk, Noel. “William Faulkner’s ‘Carcassonne.’” Studies in American Fiction 12 (1984): 29-43. Print.

Sayre, Robert. “Artistic Self-Theft as Obsession and Creative Transformation: The ‘Memphis’ Stories and Beyond.” The Faulkner Journal 13.1/2 (Spring 1998): 37-55. Print.

Sayre, Robert. “La Fidélité à l’idée du Vieux Sud dans quelques nouvelles de Faulkner.” Imaginaires: La Fidélité en question. Reims: PU de Reims, 1996. 157-65. Print.

Sayre, Robert. “Romanticism and the Faulknerian Short Story of the Early 1930s.ˮ Journal of the Short Story in English 20 (Spring 1993): 65-80. Print.

Sayre, Robert. “The Southern Poor White in Two Short Stories by William Faulkner.” Envisioning Poverty/Concevoir la pauvreté. Ed. William Dow. Université Gustave Eiffel: Laboratoire LISAA, 2016. Web.

Skei, Hans H. William Faulkner: The Short Story Career. Oslo: Unversitetsforlaget, 1981. Print.

Skei, Hans H. William Faulkner: The Novelist as Short Story Writer. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1985. Print.

Skei, Hans H. Reading Faulkner’s Best Short Stories. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1999. Print.

Skei, Hans H., ed. William Faulkner’s Short Fiction: An International Symposium. Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1997. Print.

Towner, Theresa M., and James B. Carothers. Reading Faulkner: Collected Stories. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2006. Print.

Towner, Theresa M. “‘The Most Demanding Formˮ: Theresa M. Towner on William Faulkner’s Radiant Short Fiction.ˮ An Interview with the Library of America, February 23, 2024. https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/faulkner-towner-stories/Web. Accessed on October 13, 2025.

Watson, Jay. “Escapes and Diversions. Whoring and Trash: Two Case Studies in the Aesthetics, Psychology, and Economics of the Twentieth-Century American Short Story.” Flannery O’Connor Review 8 (2010): 5-21. Print.

Practical Details

The editors invite abstracts of 300 to 500 words (in English) on relevant topics. Please send an abstract with a short biographical note (100 words maximum) to francoise.buisson@univ-pau.fr, solveig.dunkel@univ-lille.fr and frederique.spill@u-picardie.fr, by October 30, 2026. Notification of provisional acceptance will be given by January 15, 2027. The completed papers will be due by May 31, 2027. They will be peer-reviewed and returned to the authors by September 2027 for a publication in June 2028. The style sheet and guidelines for authors are available on the JSSE website: https://journals-openedition-org.rproxy.univ-pau.fr/jsse/234.

Notes

1 “I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.” From Jean Stein’s Paris Review interview.

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