Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction (PDF)

JOHN N. DUVALL is Professor of English at Purdue University, USA. He is author of Faulkner's Marginal Couple: Invisible Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities, The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness, and editor or co-editor of Modern Fiction Studies, Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies, Faulkner and Postmodernism, Approaches to Teaching DeLillo's White Noise, and the Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo.

"Duvall is renowned as a critic of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, and these two writers inform the conceptual framework of Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction...[This is] an often provocative but always engaging book." - Journal of American Studies

"Duvall's readers, who have received good instruction in the uses of minstrelsy and white face (conscious and unconscious) in a variety of texts, will be on the lookout for the trope in other Southern writing. Those who teach about that writing will find that Duvall has strengthened their arsenal." - Joseph M. Flora, Mississippi Quarterly

"I applaud Duvall's careful positioning of his terms throughout his study and its apparatus and find that it opens a well-considered space for discussion of the relationships of whiteness, blackness, and their relative visible and cultural forms...Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction: From Faulkner to Morrison primes one for the possibility of more recombinatory work on race, race changes, and the dismantling of whiteness." - Contemporary Literature

"Duvall's study is an ambitious one, able to cover a great deal of conceptual ground with an admirable economy of expression...lucid and compelling, an essential volume for scholars of the American South, critical race theory, and twentieth-century literature." - South Atlantic Review

"Duvall positions his argument between queer and feminist performance studies, on the one hand, and critical race and whiteness studies, on the other...In treating race as a form of cultural performance enacted by authors and their novels, Duvall joins a group of scholars...who, at long last, are moving past the notion that race is, as Frantz Fanon famously put it, a factually 'epidermal schema.'" - Novel

"For some reason, the synergy between critical whiteness studies and southern literary studies has been slow to develop. That changes with Duvall's Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction. In