Description: The first book-length critical study of Faulkner's fictional depictions of the legal vocation and the practice of law. Examining Faulkner's lawyer characters in light of the southern storytelling tradition, Jay Watson argues that the forensic competence of the Faulknerian lawyer is a direct function of his skill as a raconteur.
Brief description: JAY WATSON is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English and Howry Emeritus Professor of Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is author or editor of twenty-one published or forthcoming books, including Fossil Fuel Faulkner: Energy, Modernity, and the U.S. South, which won the 2023 C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature; William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity, which won the 2020 Holman Award; and two University of Georgia Press publications, Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985, which received Honorable Mention for the 2013 Holman Award, and Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner. He lives and writes in Mississippi and North Carolina.