The universality of William Faulkner's vision was perhaps most formally recognized in 1950, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But even beyond the basic human truths embodied in the people and terrain of Yoknapatawpha County, there is a special kinship between Faulkner's novels and stories of the defeated South and the culture of postwar Japan, itself reeling from the shock of surrender and reconstruction at the hands of a foreign army. Reflecting this kinship, Faulkner Studies in Japan brings together some of the finest critical essays on Faulkner published in Japan in recent years along with discussions by several of Japan's leading novelists of Faulkner's influence on their work. The collection includes essay on broad aspects of Faulkner's writing-the influence of T.S. Eliot on the fiction, the pervasive use of motion imagery-and on such individual works as Light in August and the story of "Was" from Go Down, Moses. The book also presents an overview of Faulkner scholarship in Japan by Kiyoyuki Ono and an Afterword by Carvel Collins that recalls Faulkner's visit to Japan in 1955. At the time of Faulkner's visit, Japanese scholarly interest in his works was already firmly established and in the succeeding years the fascination has, if anything, increased. Commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Faulkner's four-week tour, Faulkner Studies in Japan explore the natural literary sympathy that the novelist himself recognized when he stated: "I believe that something very like [what happened in the American South] will happen here in Japan in the next few years--that out of your despair and disaster will come a group of Japanese writers whom all the world will want to listen to, who will speak not a Japanese truth but a universal truth.

William Faulkner remains one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, and Faulkner Studies offers up seemingly endless ways to engage anew questions and problems that continue to occupy literary studies into the twenty-first century, and beyond the compass of Faulkner himself. His corpus has proved particularly accommodating of a range of perspectives and methodologies that include Black studies, visual culture studies, world literatures, modernist studies, print culture studies, gender and sexuality studies, sound studies, the energy humanities, and much else. The fifteen essays collected in The New William Faulkner Studies charts these developments in Faulkner scholarship over the course of this new century and offers prospects for further interrogation of his oeuvre.

For Oe Kenzaburo, a Japanese novelist who won the 1994 Noble prize in literature, William Faulkner is not so much a father of Yoknapatawpha as he is a critic of the masculine possessiveness attributed to the creation of the imaginary county. Faulkner and Oe: The Self-Critical Imagination focuses on the Faulknerian influence on Oe's satirical or self-critical imagination-especially on his feminist or hermaphroditic criticism of the male "I" contained within the shosetsu (novel). Akio Kimura expertly investigates Oe's feminist turn in his novels in the 1980s as a criticism of this "I" as an authoritarian first-person narrator. Oe considers this concept to be a disruptive reflection of Japanese society's established order. Oe's response to such a disruption is the introduction of a series of metaphors utilized in order to represent Faulkner's individualism and the subsequent deconstruction of Japanese autocracy. Drawing on Kofman, Irigaray, and Derrida, this book explores how Faulkner's individualism inspires Oe to juxtapose the Japanese authoritarian and the Faulknerian self-critical. Kimura explains that Oe's intensive reading of Faulkner's later novels-The Town, The Mansion, A Fable-has brought him a sense of ambiguity, or his awareness of being split between the Japanese "I" and the Western "I." By comparing these two significant novelists, this study acutely highlights the generic difference between the novel of the West and the Japanese shosetsu.